UFS 3.1 memory based on QLC bones from Kioxia. More capacity at the expense of durability

The Japanese company Kioxia, which was created after the separation of Toshiba Memory from Toshiba Corporation five years ago, boasted about its latest achievement on the memory market intended mainly for smartphones. She developed UFS 3.1 memory based on QLC bones in the form of a PoC product.

Kioxia announced UFS 3.1 memory based on QLC bones, but at the moment it’s just a Proof of Concept

PoC, or Proof of Concept, is an example of a product that is to show the world that “it is possible”, although they are far from being properly optimized in terms of mass production or full functionality. Therefore, it is difficult to say that Kioxia has already developed a full-fledged UFS 3.1 memory based on QLC bones, because this one still requires a lot of polish before it goes to smartphones. They are currently under development and have certain function limitations, and their specifications may change.

At the moment, UFS 3.1 memory based on QLC chips from Kioxia takes the form of a 512-gigabyte prototype, which consists of 128-gigabit 3D BiCS FLASH memory chips in the QLC configuration. This means that the cells of this memory can store not two (MLC), not three (TLC), but as much as four bits, which results in much greater capacity, but at the cost of both durability and performance.

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We do not know the details (except for the capacity) and to emphasize that Kioxia has designed this memory to meet the growing requirements in terms of performance and memory density, set by mobile applications, higher resolution images, 5G networks or 4K recordings.