SK hynix has built zoning into its UFS flash for smartphones. Fingernail-sized UFS (Universal Flash Standard) flash cards are used to store data in small devices such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, smart TV boxes, augmented and virtual reality headsets, as well as vehicular video and logging apps.
Zoning NAND involves storing data with similar characteristics concerning IO frequency such as read-intensive, write-intensive, and mixed read/write, in separate areas or blocks of a NAND drive so that IO patterns can be smoothed out to prolong drive life and shorten data transfers. IBM Research and Radian Memory Systems found SSD zoning can deliver three times more throughput, 65 percent more transactions per second, and substantially extend an SSD’s working life.
SK hynix has devised Zoned Universal Flash Storage (ZUFS) in collaboration with a platform services customer, and says it’s good for on-device AI applications as it optimizes data transfer between an operating system and storage devices.
Ahn Hyun, head of the N-S Committee at SK hynix, said: “SK hynix will continue to work toward strengthening its leadership as the global top AI memory provider by supplying high-performance NAND solutions that meet such higher requirements at a right time, while building up stronger partnership with leading ICT companies.”
It forsees mobile devices running generative AI models with ZUFS providing faster data transfer for these compute and data-intensive apps.
Read and write performance degradation improves by more than 4x and NAND endurance increases by 40 percent.
ZUFS development started in 2019 and the latest ZUFS 4.0 product meets the JEDEC (Joint Electron Device Engineering Council) zoned namespace (ZNS) specifications.
Samsung introduced a ZNS SSD, the PM1731a, in 2021. It said at the time that conventional SSDs need to move and rearrange data during garbage collection operations; the recovery of capacity in NAND blocks when files are deleted. ZNS SSDs can significantly reduce the number of write operations, lowering the drive’s write amplification factor (WAF) — the amount of actual writes performed by the drive compared to writes initially instructed by the host system. The closer the WAF is to one, the more efficient the SSD and the longer it will last.
SK hynix has now applied this technology to UFS format NAND for mobile devices. It will start ZUFS 4.0 mass production in the third quarter for use in various smartphones with on-device AI. We can expect other UFS suppliers, such as Kioxia, Micron and Samsung, to develop their own zoned UFS devices.
