NAND flash memory has advantages of non-volatility, little power consumption and fast access time. However, it suffers from inability that does not provide to update-in-place and the erase cycle is limited. Moreover, the unit of read/write operation is a page and the unit of erase operation is a block. Therefore, erase operation is slower than other operations. The AGC, the proposed garbage collection policy focuses on not only garbage collection time reduction for real-time guarantee but also wear-leveling for a flash memory lifetime. In order to achieve above goals, we define three garbage collection operating modes: Fast Mode, Smart Mode, and Wear-leveling Mode. The proposed policy decides the garbage collection mode depending on system CPU usage rate. Fast Mode selects the dirtiest block as victim block to minimize the erase operation time. However, Smart Mode selects the victim block by reflecting the invalid page number and block erase count to minimizing the erase operation time and deviation of block erase count. Wear-leveling Mode operates similar to Smart Mode and it makes groups and relocates the pages which has the similar update time. We implemented the proposed policy and measured the performance compare with the existing policies. Simulation results show that the proposed policy performs better than Cost-benefit policy with the 55% reduction in the operation time. Also, it performs better than Greedy policy with the 87% reduction in the deviation of erase count. Most of all, the proposed policy works adaptively according to the CPU usage rate, and guarantees the real-time performance of the system.

QR/NFC tags have been utilized in various fields like exhibition, museum, and so on, but they have a drawback that they are read-only fundamentally. We devise a novel device called a smart memory tag (below mem-tag) which is supplemented with the write function through combining a flash memory into a NFC tag. A mem-tag is composed of an NFC tag, an MCU, a flash memory, a bluetooth module, and a battery, and is inter-operating with smartphones via bluetooth communication. It can be used in a bulletin board to support writing replies and in a check-in service to verify the presence of the site. What matters is that users' inter-operations are borne to be asynchronous, which leads to the energy consumption to wait for users' actions. Sleep mechanisms and asynchronous MAC protocols used in ubiquotous sensor networks cannot avoid the consumption of battery. In this paper, we propose a touch and play scheme for minimizing the consumption of battery that the MCU wakes up and PLAY when a user TOUCH the mem-tag. We implemented the system to show that our scheme lets the mem-tag work 50 times longer than the sleep and wake-up scheme.

In recent years, non-volatile memory express (NVMe), a new host controller interface standard, has been adapted to overcome performance bottlenecks caused by the acceleration of solid state drives (SSD). Recently, performance breakthrough cases over AHCI based SATA SSDs by adapting NVMe based PCI Express (PCIe) SSD to servers and PCs have been reported. Furthermore, replacing legacy eMMC-flash storage with NVMe based storage is also considered for next generation of mobile devices such as smartphones. The Linux kernel includes drivers for NVMe support, and as the kernel version increases, the implementation of the NVMe driver code has changed. However, mobile devices are often equipped with older versions of Android operating systems (OSes), where the newest features of NVMe drivers are not available. Therefore, different features of different NVMe driver implementations are not well evaluated on Android OSes. In this paper, we analyze the response time of the NVMe driver for various Linux kernel version.

In this paper, we propose BCMR (Block Classification with Monitor and Restriction) to ensure the isolation and to reduce the interference of blocks between a garbage collection and a wear leveling. The proposed BCMR monitors an endurance variation of blocks during the garbage collection and detects hot blocks by making a restriction condition based on this information. The proposal induces a block classification by its update frequency for the garbage collection and the wear leveling, so we will get a prolonged lifetime of NAND flash memory systems. In a performance evaluation, BCMR prolonged the lifetime of NAND flash memory systems by 3.95%, on average and reduced a standard deviation per block by 7.4%, on average.

Software safety is a key issue in embedded system of automotive and aviation industries. Various software testing approaches have been proposed to achieve software safety like ISO26262 Part 6 in automotive environment. In spite of one of the classic and basic approaches, stack memory is hard to estimating exactly because of uncertainty of target code generated by compiler and complex nested interrupt. In this paper, we propose an approach of analyzing the maximum stack usage statically from target binary code rather than the source code that also allows nested interrupts for determining the exact stack memory size. In our approach, determining maximum stack usage is divided into three steps: data extraction from ELF file, construction of call graph, and consideration of nested interrupt configurations for determining required stack size from the ISR (Interrupt Service Routine). Experimental results of the estimation of the maximum stack usage shows proposed approach is helpful for optimizing stack memory size and checking the stability of the program in the embedded system that especially supports nested interrupts.

To replace conventional DRAM, many researches have been done on nonvolatile memories. The DRAM&PCM hybrid memory is one of the effective structure because it can utilize an advantage of DRAM and PCM. However, in order to use this characteristics, pages can be replaced frequently between DRAM and PCM. Therefore, PCM still has major problem that has write-limits. Therefore, it needs an effective page management method for exploiting each memory characteristics dynamically and adaptively. So we aim reducing an average access time and write count of PCM by utilizing two locality for an effective page replacement. We proposed a page selection algorithm which is recently requested to write in DRAM and an algorithm witch uses two locality in PCM. According to our simulation, the proposed algorithm for the DRAM&PCM hybrid can reduce the PCM write count by around 22% and the average access time by 31% given the same PCM size, compared with CLOCK-DWF algorithm.

High performance non-volatile memory system can mitigate the gap between main memory and storage. However, no single memory devices fulfill the requirements. Non-volatile Dual In-line Memory Module (NVDIMM) consisted of DRAMs and NAND Flashes has been proposed to achieve the performance and non-volatility simultaneously. When power outage occurs, data in DRAM is backed up into NAND Flash using a small-size external energy storage such as a supercapacitor. Backup and restore operations of NVDIMM do not cooperate with the operating system in the NVDIMM standard, thus there is room to optimize its operation. This paper analysis the operation of NVDIMM and proposes a method to reduce backup and restore time. Particularly, data compression is introduced to reduce the amount of data that to be backed up and restored. The simulation results show that the proposed method reduces up to 72.6% of backup and restore time.

Due to the characteristics of low power, high durability and high density, NAND flash memory is being heavily used in various type of devices such as USB, SD card, smart phone and SSD. On the other hand, because of another characteristic of flash cell with the limited number of program/erase cycles, NAND flash memory has a short lifetime compared to other storage devices. To overcome the lifetime problem, many researches related to the wear leveling have been conducted. This paper presents a method called a TCB (Tracking Cold Blocks) using more reinforced constraint conditions when classifying cold blocks than previous works. TCB presented in this paper keeps a MCT (Migrated Cold block Table) to manage the enhanced classification process of cold blocks, with which unnecessary migrations of pages can be reduced much more. Through the experiments, we show that TCB reduces the overhead of wear leveling by about 30% and increases the lifetime up to about 60% compared to BET and BST.