JEDEC Announces Publication of eMMC Standard Update v4.41

JEDEC Solid State Technology Association, the global leader in standards development for the microelectronics industry, today announced the publication of JESD84-A441: Embedded MultiMediaCard (eMMC) Product Standard v4.41. Continuing the evolution of eMMC as an industry-leading memory technology, the new v4.41 contains corrections of critical errata found in the previous v4.4 specification, and offers new, optional features that designers may utilize to improve system performance. The v4.41 update is a replacement of v4.4 which is now considered obsolete. JESD84-A441 is available for free download at http://www.jedec.org.

Designed for a wide range of applications in consumer electronics, navigational systems and other industrial uses, eMMC is an embedded non-volatile memory system, comprised of both flash memory and a flash memory controller, which simplifies the application interface design and frees the host processor from low-level flash memory management. This benefits product developers by simplifying the non-volatile memory interface design and qualification process - resulting in a reduction in time-to-market as well as facilitating support for future flash device offerings. Small BGA package sizes and low power consumption make eMMC a viable, low-cost memory solution for mobile and other space-constrained products.

eMMC v4.41 offers new options for enhancing device performance, including a high priority interrupt mechanism (HPI) and host-controlled background operations processing (BO). HPI enables the host device to interrupt a potentially time-consuming operation, such as writing a large file, in order to execute a high-priority read operation from the eŸMMC, then later return to the interrupted activity. BO allows the eMMC to give an indication to the host device when a background flash clean-up operation is needed to maintain eMMC device performance. The host device can then allocate time for eMMC to perform the background operation in a controlled manner at a convenient time. Both features offer designers additional options to improve device performance for the end user.

"As mobile devices continue to require support for increasing amounts of mass storage memory, JEDEC is pleased to help address the storage demands of the market with eŸMMC: a low-cost, high-performance solution," said Mian Quddus, Chairman, JEDEC Board of Directors.