Samsung brings ultra-fast microSD for LTE generation

Samsung Electronics has announced that it has started production of its ultra-fast microSD cards, officially known as Ultra High Speed-1 microSD cards, designed to make the most of high-demand devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

The semiconductor manufacturer said on Wednesday that it had already started making the 16GB capacity UHS-1 microSD cards late in March and that they are designed to work within the performance levels demanded by LTE-equipped devices.

"MicroSD cards with a UHS-1 interface offer users an extremely high level of performance on their LTE smartphones and for other advanced mobile applications," Wanhoon Hong, executive vice president, memory sales and marketing at Samsung Electronics, said in a statement. "This allows consumers to enjoy high-quality images and video playback directly from the memory cards, which fully support the advanced performance features of diverse digital gadgets."

The company confirmed it also plans to produce higher capacity microSD cards that use the UHS-1 profile, as have already been seen in full-size SD cards.

The key advantage of the UHS-1 standard is that it has a much faster read and write speed than Class 4, Class 6, and Class 10 SDHC speed standards making it suitable for use in digital SLR cameras and other high demand devices, such as phones and tablets.

Samsung's UHS-1 16GB memory card is comprised of the company's 20 nanometer-class 64 gigabit (Gb) toggle DDR 2.0 devices and an advanced Samsung controller supporting the ultra fast UHS-1 interface, Samsung said. It added that in its own internal testing, the card has an 80MB/s sequential read speed, around four times faster than other "advanced" microSD cards on the market now, it said.