• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.59 no.6
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• pp.1095-1102
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• 2010

This paper presents an equalizer reducing CCI(cell-to-cell interference) in MLC NAND flash memory. High growth of the flash memory market has been driven by two combined technological efforts that are an aggressive scaling technique which doubles the memory density every year and the introduction of MLC(multi level cell) technology. Therefore, the CCI is a critical factor which affects occurring data errors in cells. We introduced an equation of CCI model and designed an equalizer reducing CCI based on the proposed equation. In the model, we have been considered the floating gate capacitance coupling effect, the direct field effect, and programming methods of the MLC NAND flash memory. Also we design and verify the proposed equalizer using Matlab. As the simulation result, the error correction ratio of the equalizer shows about 20% under 20nm NAND process where the memory channel model has serious CCI.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.44 no.11
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• pp.1130-1137
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• 2017

The multi-leveling technique that stores multiple bits in a single memory cell has significantly improved the density of NAND flash memory along with shrinking processes. However, because of the side effects of the multi-leveling technique, the average write performance of MLC NAND flash memory is degraded more than twice that of SLC NAND flash memory. In this paper, we introduce existing cross-layer optimization techniques proposed to improve the performance of MLC NAND flash-based storages, and propose a new integration technique that overcomes the limitations of existing techniques by exploiting their complementarity. By fully exploiting the performance asymmetry in MLC NAND flash devices at the flash translation layer, the proposed technique can handle many write requests with the performance of SLC NAND flash devices, thus significantly improving the performance of NAND flash-based storages. Experimental results show that the proposed technique improves performance 39% on average over individual techniques.

• 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.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.321-328
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• 2016

Typical MLC NAND flash devices are considered less reliable than SLC NAND flash devices. Although raw bit error rate (RBER) of MLC flash had been considered approximately 1000times or more higher than that of SLC flash, recent research conducted on Google's data center shows that it is much lower than such expectation. Based on the research, we devised In Drive Data Duplication (IDDD) scheme that efficiently exploit MLC flash's sufficient capacity to improve its data reliability without structural complexity increment using SSD intrinsic firmware layer, and showed the data reliability expectation of MLC flash could be significantly higher than that of SLC flash from measured and calculated error rates. Even though RBER of SLC flash was lower than that of MLC flash in 44 out of 48 cases we studied, applying IDDD scheme, RBER of MLC flash was became lower than that of SLC in all 48 cases and uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER) of MLC flash was became lower than that of SLC flash in 45 out of 48 cases.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.52 no.9
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• pp.54-62
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• 2015

Although NAND flash-based SSD (Solid-State Drive) provides superior performance in comparison to HDD (Hard Disk Drive), it has a major drawback in write endurance. As a result, the lifetime of SSD is determined by the workload and thus it becomes a big challenge in current technology trend of such as the shifting from SLC (Single Level Cell) to MLC (Multi Level cell) and even TLC (Triple Level Cell). Most previous studies have dealt with wear-leveling or improving SSD lifetime regarding hardware architecture. In this paper, we propose the optimal configuration of host I/O stack focusing on file system, I/O scheduler, and link power management using JEDEC enterprise workloads in terms of WAF (Write Amplification Factor) which represents the efficiency perspective of SSD life time especially for host write processing into flash memory. Experimental analysis shows that the optimum configuration of I/O stack for the perspective of SSD lifetime is MinPower-Dead-XFS which prolongs the lifetime of SSD approximately 2.6 times in comparison with MaxPower-Cfq-Ext4, the best performance combination. Though the performance was reduced by 13%, this contributions demonstrates a considerable aspect of SSD lifetime in relation to I/O stack optimization.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.39A no.3
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• pp.127-139
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• 2014

In this paper, we present two signal processing techniques for designing binary error correction codes for Multi-Level Cell(MLC) NAND flash memory. MLC NAND flash memory saves the non-binary symbol at each cell and shows asymmetric channel LLR l-density which makes it difficult to design soft-decision binary error correction codes such as LDPC codes and Polar codes. Therefore, we apply density mirroring and EM algorithm for approximating the MLC NAND flash memory channel to the binary-input memoryless channel. The density mirroring processes channel LLRs to satisfy roughly all-zero codeword assumption, and then EM algorithm is applied to l-density after density mirroring for approximating it to mixture of symmetric Gaussian densities. These two signal processing techniques make it possible to use conventional code design algorithms, such as density evolution and EXIT chart, for MLC NAND flash memory channel.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea TC
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• v.47 no.7
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• pp.1-7
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• 2010

In this paper, we use the maximum-likelihood detection by the estimation of trellis targets on the 16-level cell NAND flash memory. This mechanism has a performance gain by using a maximum-likelihood detector. The NAND flash memory channel is a memory channel because of the coupling effect. Thus, we use the known data arrays to finding the targets of trellis. The maximum-likelihood detection by proposed scheme performs better than the threshold detection on the 16-level cell NAND flash memory channel.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.50 no.4
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• pp.239-245
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• 2013

The data retention characteristics depending on neighbor cell's threshold voltage (Vt) in a multilevel NAND flash memory is studied. It is found that a Vt shift (${\Delta}Vt$) of the noted cell during a thermal retention test is increased as the number of erase-state (lowest Vt state) cells surrounding the noted cell increases. It is because a charge loss from a floating gate is originated from not only intrinsic mechanism but also lateral electric field between the neighboring cells. From the electric field simulation, we can find that the electric field is increased and it results in the increased charge loss as the device is scaled down.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.12
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• pp.1-7
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• 2010

In this paper, we suggested a sensing method of PoRAM with the multilevel cell When a specific voltage is applied between top and bottom electrodes of PoRAM unit cell, we can distinguish cell states by changing resistance values of the cell. Especially, we can use the PoRAM as the multilevel cell due to have four stable resistance values per cell. Therefore, we proposed an address decoding method, sense amplifier and control signal for sensing of a multilevel cell. The sense amplifier is designed based on a current comparator that compared a cell current the cell with a reference current, and have a low input impedance for a amplification of the current. The proposed circuit was designed in a $0.13{\mu}m$ CMOS technology, we verified to sense each data "00", "01", "10", "10" by four states of a cell current.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
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• v.53 no.1
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• pp.36-42
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• 2016

In multi-level-cell based storage devices, TLC NAND has been employed solid state drive due to cost effectiveness. Since TLC has slow performance and low endurance compared with MLC, TLC based storage has adopted SLC buffer scheme to improve performance. To improve SLC buffer scheme, this paper proposes page overwriting method in SLC block. This method provides data updates without erase operation within a limited number. When SLC buffer area is filled up, FTL should execute copying valid pages and erasing it. The proposed method reduces erase counts by 50% or more compared with previous SLC buffer scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed SLC buffer overwrite method achieves 2 times write performance improvement.