• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.11 no.4
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• pp.305-311
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• 2005

Flash memory software running on cellular phones and PDAs need to be tested extensively to cope with abrupt power and media faults. For those tests, we designed and implemented a Flash memory emulator with fault injection features. The fault injection tester has provided a helpful framework for designing fault recovery schemes and also for analyzing fault damages to the FTL (Flash Translation Layer) and file system for a Flash memory based system. In this paper, we discuss Plash memory fault types and fault injection features implemented on this Flash memory emulator. We then discuss in detail a design flaw revealed during fault injection tests. Specifically, it was revealed that a scheme that was believed to improve reliability instead, turned out to be harmful. In addition, we discuss post-fault behaviors of the FTL and the file system.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.36-45
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• 2002

This paper introduces the design and implementation of a flash memory simulator to emulate a real flash memory. Since this simulator provides exact execution time information and parameter testing functions as well as the type, total capacity, block size, and page size of flash memory, it can be used as a real flash memory as viewed by the operating system. Furthermore, the simulator provides time logging functions of the internal routines of the flash memory management software allowing the monitoring of bottlenecks within the software. Finally, we show the performance measurements of applications under the Linux operating systems on both the simulator and a test board verifying the simulator's use as a replacement for real flash memory.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.647-648
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• 2008

Traditional FTL and flash file systems based of NAND flash memory may not be adaptively applied to new fusion flash memory which combines the advantages of NAND and NOR flash memory. In this paper, we propose a FTL performance measurement tool using Multi Block Erase function of fusion flash memory. The performance measurement tool shows that multi block erase function can be effectively utilized in performance enhancement of garbage collection for fusion flash memory.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.521-531
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• 2009

Flash memory has physical characteristics different from hard disk where two costs of a read and write operations differ each other and an overwrite on flash memory is impossible to be done. In order to solve these restrictions with software, storage systems equipped with flash memory deploy FTL(Flash Translation Layer) software. Several FTL algorithms have been suggested so far and most of them prefer sequential write pattern to random write pattern. In this paper, we provide a new technique to efficiently store and maintain the B-tree index on flash memory. The operations like inserts, deletes, updates of keys for the B-tree generate random writes rather than sequential writes on flash memory, leading to inefficiency to the B-tree maintenance. In our technique, we convert random writes generated by the B-tree into sequential writes and then store them to the write-buffer on flash memory. If the buffer is full later, some sequential writes in the buffer will be issued to FTL. Our diverse experimental results show that our technique outperforms the existing ones with respect to the I/O cost of flash memory.

• Journal of The Institute of Information and Telecommunication Facilities Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.115-120
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• 2011

Recently flash memory is widely used in various mobile devices as storage medium. Nonvolatile memory can be divided into two categories: NAND- and NOR-type flash memory. NOR flash memory is mainly used to store instruction codes for operation; while NAND for data storage. However, NAND does show more economical benefits, that is, it is approximately 30~40% cheaper than NOR flash. Therefore it can be useful to improve NAND flash performance by replacing NOR flash with NAND flash combining with various buffer systems.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.34 no.12
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• pp.683-695
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• 2007

NAND flash memory-based file systems cannot store their system-related information in the file system due to wear-leveling of NAND flash memory. This forces NAND flash memory-based file systems to scan the whole flash memory during their mounts. The mount time usually increases linearly according to the size of and the usage pattern of the flash memory. NAND flash memory has been widely used as the storage medium of mobile devices. Due to the fact that mobile devices have unstable power supply, the file system for NAND flash memory requires stable recovery mechanism from power failure. In this paper, we present design and implementation of a new NAND flash memory-based file system that provides fast mount and enhanced stability. Our file system mounts 19 times faster than JFFS2's and 2 times faster than YAFFS's. The stability of our file system is also shown to be equivalent to that of JFFS2.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.51 no.12
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• pp.72-82
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• 2014

Recently, the size of semiconductor industry market is constantly growing, due to the increase in diffusion of smart-phone, tablet PC and SSD(Solid State Drive). Also, it is expected that the demand for TLC NAND-type flash memory would gradually increase, with the recent release of TLC NAND-type flash memory in the SSD market. There have been a lot of studies on SLC NAND flash memory, but no research on TLC NAND flash memory has been conducted, yet. Also, a test of NAND-type flash memory is depending on a high-priced external equipment. Therefore, this study aims to suggest a structure for an autonomous test with no high-priced external test device by modifying the existing SLC NAND flash memory and MLC NAND flash memory test algorithms and patterns and applying them to TLC NAND flash memory.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.32 no.4
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• pp.177-185
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• 2005

NAND-type flash memory is becoming increasingly popular as a large data storage for mobile computing devices. Since flash memory is an order of magnitude more expensive than magnetic disks, data compression can be effectively used in managing flash memory based storage systems. However, compressed data management in NAND-type flash memory is challenging because it supports only page-based I/Os. For example, when the size of compressed data is smaller than the page size. internal fragmentation occurs and this degrades the effectiveness of compression seriously. In this paper, we present an efficient flash compression layer (FCL) for NAND-type flash memory which stores several small compressed pages into one physical page by using a write buffer Based on prototype implementation and simulation studies, we show that the proposed scheme offers the storage of flash memory more than $140\%$ of its original size and expands the write bandwidth significantly.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.7
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• pp.789-793
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• 2010

Recently, flash memory-based non-volatile cache (NVC) is emerging as an effective solution to enhance both I/O performance and energy consumption of storage systems. To get significant performance and energy gains by NVC, it would be better to use multi-level-cell (MLC) flash memories since it can provide a large capacity of NVC with low cost. However, the number of available program/erase cycles of MLC flash memory is smaller than that of single-level-cell (SLC) flash memory limiting the lifespan of NVC. To overcome such a limitation, SLC/MLC combined flash memory is a promising solution for NVC. In this paper, we propose an effective management scheme for heterogeneous SLC and MLC regions of the combined flash memory.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.263-272
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• 2011

The complexity of flash memory based storage systems is high due to diverse host interfaces and other design choices such as mapping granularity, flash memory controller execution models and so on. Thus, it is possible that the actual performance after implementation is not consistent with the target performance. This paper demonstrates that the performance prediction of flash memory based storage systems is possible through performance modeling that takes into account various design parameters. In the performance modeling, the FTL, which is the core element of flash memory based storage systems, is modeled as a set of (copy-on-write) logs and their interactions. Also, the flash memory controller is modeled based on the classification proposed in the design of the Ozone flash controller. In this study, the performance model has been implemented using Simulink and experimental results are presented and analyzed.