Western Digital Powers Mobile Applications in 5g Era

With its new Western Digital iNAND MC EU521, an embedded Universal Flash Storage (UFS) device, Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: 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, Western Digital is among the first in the industry to deliver commercial storage solutions optimized for UFS 3.1 5G applications and capabilities.

The Western Digital iNAND MC EU521 embedded flash device allows mobile developers to take full advantage of UFS 3.1 high-interface bandwidth (Gear 4 / 2 Lanes) as well as SLC (single-level cell) 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 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 senior vice president and general manager, Huibert Verhoeven, Western Digital’s Automotive, Mobile and Emerging business unit. “The SLC caching in the iNAND EU521 with Write Booster offers users several key performance improvements, such as the ability to download a 4K movie in 3.6 seconds. 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 at 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.