• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.94-101
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• 2013

The market for NAND flash-based storage devices has grown significantly as they rapidly replace traditional disk-based storage devices. Heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices using both multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memories are also actively researched since both types of memories complement each other. Heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices suffer from the overheads incurred by migration from SLC to MLC and garbage collection of SLC. This paper proposes a new flash translation layer (FTL) for heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices to reduce the overheads by utilizing SLC efficiently. The proposed FTL analyzes the access patterns of logical blocks and selects and stores only logical blocks expected to bring performance improvement in SLC. The experimental results show that the total execution time of heterogeneous NAND flash-based storage devices with our proposed FTL scheme is 35% shorter than that with the previously proposed best FTL scheme.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2010.06a
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• pp.271-272
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• 2010

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.12A no.3 s.93
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• pp.205-214
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• 2005

Flash memory is at high speed used as storage of personal information utilities, ubiquitous computing environments, mobile phones, electronic goods, etc. This is because flash memory has the characteristics of low electronic power, non-volatile storage, high performance, physical stability, portability, and so on. However, differently from hard disks, it has a weak point that overwrites on already written block of flash memory is impossible to be done. In order to make an overwrite possible, an erase operation on the written block should be performed before the overwrite, which lowers the performance of flash memory highly. In order to solve this problem the flash memory controller maintains a system software module called the flash translation layer(FTL). Of many proposed FTL schemes, the log block buffer scheme is best known so far. This scheme uses a small number of log blocks of flash memory as a write buffer, which reduces the number of erase operations by overwrites, leading to good performance. However, this scheme shows a weakness of low page usability of log blocks. In this paper, we propose an enhanced log block buffer scheme, FAST(Full Associative Sector Translation), which improves the page usability of each log block by fully associating sectors to be written by overwrites to the entire log blocks. We also show that our FAST scheme outperforms the log block buffer scheme.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2011.06a
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• pp.551-554
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• 2011

덮어쓰기 제약(overwirte limitation)과 삭제 횟수 제한(limitted erase cycle)이 있는 플래시 메모리의 특징이 의하여, 플래시 메모시는 시스템에서 요청한 쓰기 요청보다 많은 수의 쓰기 연산을 수행하게 되는데, 시스템에서 요청한 쓰기요청과 실제 쓰기 연산 간의 비율을 쓰기 증폭 인자(Write Amplification Factor, 이후 WAF)라 한다. WAF는 성능과 신뢰성에 중요한 요소로 본 논문에서는 WAF를 예측 할 수 있는 분석모델을 제안한다. 제안된 모델은 페이지 사상 FTL, 블록 사상 FTL, 혼합 사상 FTL 등 다양한 FTL에서 WAF를 예측 할 수 있으며, 예측에 사용되는 매개 변수로 이용율(utilization), 무작위율(randomness), 연관도(Associativity)만을 사용하여 단순하다는 특성이 있다. 본 논문은 실제 Linux 환경에서 측정한 WAF와 비교 분석 결과 제안된 모델이 WAF를 정확히 예측 할 수 있음을 발견하였다.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.27-35
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• 2021

NAND flash memory-based SSD needs an internal software, Flash Translation Layer(FTL) to provide traditional block device interface to the host because of its physical constraints, such as erase-before-write and large erase block. However, because useful host-side information cannot be delivered to FTL through the narrow block device interface, SSDs suffer from a variety of problems such as increasing garbage collection overhead, large tail-latency, and unpredictable I/O latency. Otherwise, the new type of SSD, open-channel SSD exposes the internal structure of SSD to the host so that underlying NAND flash memory can be managed directly by the host-level FTL. Especially, I/O data classification by using host-side information can achieve the reduction of garbage collection overhead. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to reduce garbage collection overhead of open-channel SSD by separating the journal from other file data for the journaling filesystem. Because journal has different lifespan with other file data, the Write Amplification Factor (WAF) caused by garbage collection can be reduced. The proposed scheme is implemented by modifying the host-level FTL of Linux and evaluated with both Fio and Filebench. According to the experiment results, the proposed scheme improves I/O performance by 46%~50% while reducing the WAF of open-channel SSDs by more than 33% compared to the previous one.

• Journal of KIISE:Databases
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• v.37 no.6
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• pp.292-299
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• 2010

Recently, as flash memory is used as digital storage devices, necessity for digital forensics is growing in a flash memory area for digital evidence analysis. For this purpose, it is important to recover crashed files stored on flash memory efficiently. However, it is inefficient to apply the hard disk based file recovery techniques to flash memory, since hard disk and flash memory have different characteristics, especially flash memory being unable to in-place update. In this paper, we propose a flash-aware file recovery technique for digital forensics. First, we propose an efficient search technique to find all crashed files. This uses meta-data maintained by FTL(Flash Translation Layer) which is responsible for write operation in flash memory. Second, we advise an efficient recovery technique to recover a crashed file which uses data location information of the mapping table in FTL. Through diverse experiments, we show that our file recovery technique outperforms the hard disk based technique.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.463-475
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• 2009

Flash memory is suitable for real time systems because of its consistent performance for random access, low power consumption and shock resistance. However, flash memory needs blocking time to perform a garbage collection to reclaim invalidated pages. Moreover, the worst-case garbage collection time is significantly longer than the best-case garbage collection time. In this paper, we propose a FTL (Flash Translation Layer) mapping scheme called KAST (K-Associative Sector Translation). In the KAST scheme, user can control the maximum association of the log block to limit the worst-case garbage collection time. Performance evaluation using simulation shows that not only KAST completes the garbage collection within the specified time but also provides about 10~15% better average performance than existing FTL schemes.

• Proceedings of the Korean Information Science Society Conference
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.826-828
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• 2005

이동 기기의 저장 장치로 플래시 메모리가 널리 사용되고 있으며 고정 하드 디스크를 대체하는 저장 매제로 부상하고 있다. 그러므로 플래시 메모리의 특성을 잘 이해하고, 최대한 효율적으로 플래시 메모리를 사용할 필요성이 있다. 이러한 역할을 해주는 것은 플래시 내부의 시스템 소프트웨어인 FTL(Fiash Translation Layer)이다. FTL은 운영체제가 디스크에 전달하는 블록을 물리적인 플래시 메모리에 맵핑하는 역할을 한다. 그러므로 플래시 메모리의 성능은 FTL 알고리즘이 결정한다. 플래시를 대체한 플래시 디스크에서는 기존의 파일 시스템이 탑재되며 간단한 섹터 기반외 이동형 기기에서와는 다른 특성을 가진다. FTL 성능을 평가하기 위해서는 실제적으로 플래시 메모리가 장착된 제품들이 동작하는 시스템에서 실험을 해야 한다. 많은 플래시 디스크는 윈도우즈에서 동작하므로 윈도우즈의 디스크 I/O를 추출하여 실험을 해야만 한다. 본 논문에서는 윈도우즈에서 물리적인 디스크 I/O 패턴을 추출하여 FTL 알고리즘의 성능을 평가하기 위한 도구 개발에 대하여 설명하고 이에 대한 간단한 결과를 보인다.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.15-18
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• 2003

Flash memory becomes more important for its fast access speed, low-power, shock resistance and nonvolatile storage. But its native restrictions that have limited 1ifetime, inability of update in place, different size unit of read/write and erase operations need to managed by FTL(Flash Translation Layer). FTL has to control the wear-leveling, address mapping, bad block management of flash memory. In this paper, we focuses on the fast access to address mapping table and proposed the way of faster valid page search in the flash memory using the VPLT(Valid Page Lookup Table). This method is expected to decrease the frequency of access of flash memory that have an significant effect on performance of read and block-transfer operations. For the validations, we implemented the FTL based on Windows CE platform and obtained an improved result.

• Journal of the Chungcheong Mathematical Society
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.137-149
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• 2018

In this paper, under the assumption of the symmetry point spread function, antireflective boundary conditions(AR-BCs) are considered in connection with the fast truncated Lagrange(FTL) method. The FTL method is proposed as an image restoration method for large-scale ill-conditioned BTTB(block Toeplitz with Toeplitz block) and BTHHTB(block Toeplitz-plus-Hankel matrix with Toeplitz-plus-Hankel blocks) linear systems([13, 17]). The implementation and efficiency of the FTL method in the AR-BCs are further illustrated. Especially, by employing the AR-BCs, both the continuity of the image and the continuity of its normal derivative are preserved at the boundary. A reconstructed image with less artifacts at the boundary is obtained as a result.