Industry Expert Blogs

Higher storage performance at a lower cost can create a bottleneck in the design of storage devices. In order to achieve higher performance, devices must use on chip DRAM, which adds to the overall cost. This is where Unified Memory Extension (UME), a JEDEC specification, comes into the picture. It is defined as extension to the JEDEC UFS (Universal Flash Storage) specification. JEDEC UFS device uses NAND flash technology for data storage. Unified Memory (UM) allows users to use part of the host memory as the device’s internal memory. Since the host memory is already available in large capacities, this mechanism provides a much bigger space for the device to use as a Write Buffer (WB) cache or to store information such as Logical to Physical (L2P) address translation tables. The UM area is physically located on the host side but ultimately belongs to the device, thereby replacing the device-integrated RAM, and reducing overall cost. Large space availability means the device can store larger amounts of WB of L2P table information resulting in higher storage performance.