Smartphones and Tablets Thirst for Bandwidth

Sam Beal Internet Marketing Manager

The explosive growth in portable devices over the past decade has left manufactures in a quandary over how to add memory to their products that meet several criteria: • High capacity • Low cost • Low power • High bandwidth The Flash storage industry has provided capacity to support large multimedia files such as video, music and photos. Accompanying the technology improvements have been standards developments that allow multi-tasking of applications and faster web browsing. The JEDEC eMMC standard evolved from 4.1 to the current 4.5 revision. The standards also have allowed applications to migrate from parallel bus interface to serial differential transmission for higher throughput. A separate industry consortia, the Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI), is developing a high-performance, serial I/O standard for data transfers between portable embedded devices such as display, cameras and application co-processors. As performance for both specifications improved both standards it became clear that there was need for only one. In 2010, both and MIPI and JEDEC adopted the UFS as the common data transfer protocol for mobile systems. Written by