WD iNAND MC EU521 Embedded Universal Flash Storage Up to 256GB

With its iNAND MC EU521, an embedded Universal flash Storage (UFS) device, Western Digital Corp. (WDC) equips mobile developers to enhance the 5G smartphone user experience.

An early supporter of JEDEC‘s implementation of Write Booster under the UFS 3.1 standard, the company is among a first in the industry to deliver commercial storage solutions optimized for UFS 3.1 5G applications and capabilities.

The iNAND MC EU521 embedded flash device allows mobile developers to take advantage of UFS 3.1 high-interface bandwidth (Gear 4 / 2 Lanes) as well as SLC NAND caching. It also offers turbo sequential write speeds up to 800MB/s ^(*) to better enable enhanced user experiences for applications such as downloading 4K and 8K media, large file transfers from the cloud, and gaming. The iNAND EU521 will be available in March 2020 in 128GB ^(**) and 256GB capacities.

“Smartphones now demand more performance and capacity as they often serve as the primary computing device for everything from streaming video, playing music, gaming and photography, to payments and mapping,” said SVP and GM, Huibert Verhoeven, automotive, mobile and emerging business unit, WD. “The SLC caching in the iNAND EU521 with Write Booster offers users several key performance improvements that when coupled with 5G are expected to bring faster movie downloads than ever before. This, and other capabilities make the EU521 a great option for today’s mobile equipment manufacturers.“

“Western Digital’s implementation of the new JEDEC storage standard, UFS 3.1, provides 5G applications with added write capability and improved caching will help smartphones deliver higher speed downloads, accelerate large file ‘saves’ and support other data-intense applications,” said Craig Stice, senior director, memory and storage, Omdia, a global technology research leader, established following the merger of the research brands of Informa Tech (Ovum, Heavy Reading and Tractica) and the acquired IHS Markit technology research portfolio. “Western Digital’s effort to meet the standard quickly is intended to give mobile device equipment manufacturers a market-ready solution to choose from.” ^(‘***)

Resource:
Blog: 5G Turbo Speeds? We First Need to Remove the Bottlenecks

The company’s devices leverage 96-layer 3D NAND and advanced UFS interface technologies to enable an user experience. This family of commercial, embedded products is designed to maintain high and persistent performance for data-intensive applications such 4K/8K video, augmented reality, virtual reality and AI. The firm also offers after-market memory cards, and backup and charging devices for mobile users.

^(*) As used for transfer rate, 1MB/s=one million bytes per second. Based on internal testing; performance may vary depending upon host device, usage conditions, drive capacity, and other factors.
^(**) As used for storage capacity, 1GB=one billion bytes. Actual user capacity may be less, depending on operating environment.
^(***) Source – Omdia, NAND Memory Intelligence Services, February 2020. Results are not an endorsement of Western Digital. Any reliance on these results is at the third-party’s own risk.