• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.7-11
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• 2009

In this study, p-channel silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon(SONOS) transistors are fabricated and characterized as an unit cell for NAND flash memory. The SONOS transistors are fabricated by $0.13{\mu}m$ low power standard logic process technology. The thicknesses of gate insulators are 2.0 nm for the tunnel oxide, 1.4 nm for the nitride layer, and 4.9 nm for the blocking oxide. The fabricated SONOS transistors show low programming voltage and fast erase speed. However, the retention and endurance of the devices show poor characteristics.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.1-8
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• 2015

Flash memory has advantages in that it is fast access speed, low-power, and low-price. Therefore, they are widely used in electronics industry sectors. However, the flash memory has weak points, which are the limited number of erase operations and non-in-place update problem. To overcome the limited number of erase operations, many wear leveling techniques are studied. They use many tables storing information such as erase count of blocks, hot and cold block indicators, reference count of pages, and so on. These tables occupy some space of main memory for the wear leveling techniques. Accordingly, they are not appropriate for low-power devices limited main memory. In order to resolve it, a wear leveling technique using bit array and Bit Set Threshold (BST) for flash memory. The proposing technique reduces the used space of main memory using a bit array table, which saves the history of block erase operations. To enhance accuracy of cold block information, we use BST, which is calculated by using the number of invalid pages of the blocks in a one-to-many mode, where one bit is related to many blocks. The performance results illustrate that the proposed wear leveling technique improve life time of flash memory to about 6%, compared with previous wear leveling techniques using a bit array table in our experiment.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.604-607
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• 2008

In this study, p-channel silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) transistors are fabricated and characterized as an unit cell for NAND flash memory. The SONOS transistors are fabricated by $0.13{\mu}m$ low power standard logic process technology. The thicknesses of gate insulators are $20{\AA}$ for the tunnel oxide, $14{\AA}$ for the nitride layer, and $49{\AA}$ for the blocking oxide. The fabricated SONGS transistors show low programming voltage, fast erase speed, and relatively good retention and endurance.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.250-253
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• 2013

In this paper, we fabricated 3D pillar type silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS) devices for high density flash applications. To solve the limitation between erase speed and data retention of the conventional SONOS devices, bandgap-engineered (BE) tunneling oxide of oxide-nitride-oxide configuration is integrated with the 3D structure. In addition, the tunneling oxide is modulated by another method of $N_2$ ion implantation ($N_2$ I/I). The measured data shows that the BE-SONOS device has better electrical characteristics, such as a lower threshold voltage ($V_{\tau}$) of 0.13 V, and a higher $g_{m.max}$ of 18.6 ${\mu}A/V$ and mobility of 27.02 $cm^2/Vs$ than the conventional and $N_2$ I/I SONOS devices. Memory characteristics show that the modulated tunneling oxide devices have fast erase speed. Among the devices, the BE-SONOS device has faster program/erase (P/E) speed, and more stable endurance characteristics, than conventional and $N_2$ I/I devices. From the flicker noise analysis, however, the BE-SONOS device seems to have more interface traps between the tunneling oxide and silicon substrate, which should be considered in designing the process conditions. Finally, 3D structures, such as the pillar type BE-SONOS device, are more suitable for next generation memory devices than other modulated tunneling oxide devices.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.9
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• pp.634-641
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• 2006

Flash memory has many advantages like non-volatility and fast I/O speed, but it has also disadvantages such as not-in-place-update data and asymmetric read/write/erase speed. For the performance of flash memory storage, it is essential for the buffer replacement algorithms to reduce the number of write operations that also affects the number of erase operations. A new buffer replacement algorithm is proposed in this paper, that delays the writes of not-cold-dirty pages in the buffer cache of flash storage. We show that this algorithm effectively decreases the number of write operations and erase operations without much degradation of hit ratio. As a result overall performance of flash I/O speed is improved.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 1998.06a
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• pp.75-78
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• 1998

The SONOSFET Shows low operation voltage, high cell density, anti good endurance due to modified Fowler-Nordheim tunneling as memory charge injection method. In this paper, therefore, the NOR-type Flash EEPROM composed of SONOSFET, which has fast lead operation speed and Random Access characteristics, is proposed. An 8${\times}$8 bit NOR-type SONOSFET Flash EEPROM had been designed and its electrical characteristics were verified. Read/Write/Erase operations of it were verified with the spice parameters of SONOSFETs which had Oxide-Nitride-Oxide thickness of 65${\AA}$-165${\AA}$-35${\AA}$ and that of scaled down as 33${\AA}$-53${\AA}$-22${\AA}$, respectively. When the memory window of the scaled-down SONOSFET with 8V operation was similar to that of the SONOSFET with 13V operation, the Read operation delay times of the scaled-down SONOSFET were 25.4ns at erase state and 32.6ns at program state, respectively, and those of the SONOSFET were 23.5ns at erase state and 28.2ns at program state, respectively.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.5
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• pp.422-428
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• 2009

NAND flash memory is widely used in embedded systems because of many attractive features, such as small size, light weight, low power consumption and fast access speed. However, it requires garbage collection, which includes erase operations. Erase operation is slower than other operations. Further, a block has a limited erase lifetime (typically 100,000) after which a block becomes unusable. The proposed garbage collection policy focuses on minimizing the total number of erase operations, the deviation value of each block and the garbage collection time. NAND flash memory consists of pages of three types, such as valid pages, invalid pages and free pages. In order to achieve above goals, we use a page ratio to decide when to do garbage collection and to select the target victimblock. Additionally, we implement allocating method and group management method. Simulation results show that the proposed policy performs better than Greedy or CAT with the maximum rate 85% of reduction in the deviation value of the erase operations and 6% reduction in garbage collection time.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.617-625
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• 2009

NAND flash memory is widely used in embedded systems because of many attractive features, such as small size, light weight, low power consumption and fast access speed. However, it requires garbage collection, which includes erase operations. Erase operation is very slow. Besides, the number of the erase operations allowed to be carried out for each block is limited. The proposed garbage collection method focuses on minimizing the total number of erase operations, the deviation value of each block and the garbage collection time. NAND flash memory consists of pages of three types, such as valid pages, invalid pages and free pages. In order to achieve above goals, we use a page rate to decide when to do garbage collection and to select the target victim block. Additionally, We implement allocating method and group management method. Simulation results show that the proposed policy performs better than Greedy or CAT with the maximum rate at 82% of reduction in the deviation value of erase operation and 75% reduction in garbage collection time.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.29-43
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• 2004

As the development of an information technique, gradually, mobile device is going to be miniaturized and operates at high speed. By such the requirements, the devices using a flash memory as a storage media are increasing. The flash memory consumes low power, is a small size, and has a fast access time like the main memory. But the flash memory must erase for recording and the erase cycle is limited. JFFS is a representative filesystem which reflects the characteristics of the flash memory. JFFS to be consisted of LSF structure, writes new data to the flash memory in sequential, which is not related to a file size. Mounting a filesystem or an error recovery is achieved through the sequential approach. Therefore, the mounting delay time is happened according to the file system size. This paper proposes a MJFFS to use a multi-checkpoint information to manage a mass flash file system efficiently. A MJFFS, which improves JFFS, divides a flash memory into the block for suitable to the block device, and stores file information of a checkpoint structure at fixed interval. Therefore mounting and error recovery processing reduce efficiently a number of filesystem access by collecting a smaller checkpoint information than capacity of actual files. A MJFFS will be suitable to a mobile device owing to accomplish fast mounting and error recovery using advantage of log foundation filesystem and overcoming defect of JFFS.

• 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.