Bringing the most advanced G9 NAND technology to flagship smartphones

In today's fast-paced world filled with the need to multi-task, flagship smartphones require high-speed and high-capacity storage to keep up with modern users’ demands. With the evolution of AI technology, having an AI assistant in your pocket is becoming a reality. AI technology is evolving to agentic frameworks, where models not only generate but autonomously reason, plan and execute complex tasks in a multimodal way. This transition will further drive memory and storage demand in devices at the edge.

At MWC25, we announced sampling the world’s first G9 NAND for mobile with our UFS 4.1 and UFS 3.1 products. The latest innovation in NAND technology, the G9 node is designed to bring peak performance and density dominance to all storage solutions. Now let’s explore the significant impact G9 has had on the new universal flash storage (UFS) mobile products. 

G9 NAND mobile UFS 4.1: Leading performance for flagship smartphones

The Micron G9 NAND mobile UFS 4.1 solution provides leading performance and innovation, enabling faster and more responsive experiences on flagship smartphones. 

Faster speed and lower latency: Imagine a world where your virtual assistant understands you perfectly, real time picture editing is seamless, and language translation happens in the blink of an eye. This is the promise of AI-powered applications driven by large language models (LLMs) and revolutionizing the digital experience for smartphone users. Ultimately, these services are expected to converge into powerful multimodal AI agents, providing swift, comprehensive, and contextual digital experiences. To achieve this, smartphones need rapid access to large datasets, lower latency, faster response times, and overall smoother end-user experiences. 

Micron G9 NAND mobile UFS 4.1 is at the forefront of this transformation and offers sequential read and write speeds of over 4100MBps. This remarkable performance leap is evident when comparing G9 UFS 4.1 to its predecessor, G8 UFS 4.0.
 

Larger capacity: Larger storage capability is one of the factors to enable increased local computational and processing power. Traditional cloud-based AI systems require sensitive data to travel across networks for processing, posing the risk of data breaches. Edge AI fundamentally lessens this risk by processing data locally, where it is created. Micron's G9 UFS 4.1 offers a large capacity option of 1TB NAND to help drive the need for on-device data processing, enabling your smartphone to handle complex computations right at your fingertips. 

Smallest and thinnest package: Micron G9 NAND UFS 4.1 isn’t just about capacity; it’s also about fitting into even the sleekest and most innovative smartphone designs. Featuring the industry leading thinnest 1TB NAND UFS package of 9x13x 0.85mm¹, this space-saving design is ideal for next-generation foldable and ultra-slim smartphone designs and frees up more room for a larger battery.  

New proprietary features: Micron’s proprietary firmware features optimize efficiency in how and where data is stored within the storage devices. These advancements collectively contribute to a more efficient and responsive storage system, optimized for the demands of everyday smartphone performance improvement and AI use cases.

• Data Defrag: Smartphone slowdown is often due to data fragmentation, where files become scattered across storage, making it harder for the device to read them efficiently. Micron's proprietary Data Defrag feature addresses this by allowing the UFS device's controller to issue defragmentation commands directly inside the NAND, bypassing the host layer. By streamlining data relocation, Data Defrag can boost read speeds by up to 60%², enhancing overall smartphone performance, including everyday tasks as well as AI-related tasks. In short, Data Defrag increases read performance and reduces the workload on the device by handling the data relocation/fragmentation internally, allowing a smartphone to access files faster and more efficiently, leading to smoother performance.

• Pinned WriteBooster: Micron’s Pinned WriteBooster feature allows a smartphone's processor to "pin" frequently used data from a specified area inside the storage device called the WriteBooster. It enables easier dynamic loading of essential data from storage to memory, ensuring more efficient processing without overloading memory capacity.  Internal test data shows random read speed can be improved by up to 30% when this feature is enabled³. With Pinned WriteBooster, the smartphone will experience faster app launches, quicker file transfers and smoother operation. This feature is particularly useful when both everyday mobile use and AI use cases need to be processed at the same time. In this scenario, with the help of Pinned WriteBooster feature, a memory map is created for the AI model’s data to enable faster data swap and data read.
   

• ILT (Intelligent Latency Tracker): Micron Intelligent Latency Tracker monitors I/O storage latency at both the system and the storage device to detect and analyze unusual delays that affect smartphone performance, such as slow app launches. By identifying these latency issues, it helps smartphone OEMs optimize the system and improve the overall user experience. This feature ensures smartphones maintain the high speeds necessary for AI applications and everyday tasks like opening the camera or finding an old vacation photo in the gallery.

• Zoned UFS (ZUFS): Imagine packing for a trip with your suitcase neatly divided into sections for socks, shirts and pants. This organization makes it quicker to find what you need. Micron Zoned UFS (ZUFS) works in a similar way for smartphone data. ZUFS organizes data with similar I/O characteristics into specific zones within the UFS device, enhancing read/write efficiency by minimizing the time spent searching for data. This streamlined data retrieval ensures faster and smoother system performance, just like finding your neatly packed socks in your suitcase.

Intelligence accelerated: future-proofing innovations

Micron mobile is focused on delivering advanced NAND flash solutions with customized features designed for flagship smartphones. These innovations are aimed at accelerating AI applications at the edge. By collaborating with customers and ecosystem partners, Micron is aligning its product and technology roadmaps with the latest trends in AI and edge computing. This collaborative approach ensures that future mobile devices will be equipped to handle increasingly complex AI tasks and data-intensive applications. G9 NAND and new firmware features are examples of Micron's commitment to innovation. 

Additional resource:

To learn more about Micron’s mobile memory and storage solutions and our latest collaborations with customers and partners, visit Mobile Memory and Storage for Phones | Micron Technology Inc.