• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.215-222
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• 2013

NAND flash memory-based Solid State Drives (SSD) have lots of merits compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDD). However, random write in SSD is still far slower than sequential read/write and random read. There are two independent approaches to resolve this problem: 1) using part of the flash memory blocks as log blocks, and 2) using internal write buffer (DRAM or Non-Volatile RAM) in SSD. While log blocks are managed by the Flash Translation Layer (FTL), write buffer management has been treated separately from FTL. Write buffer management schemes did not use the exact status of log blocks and log block management schemes in FTL did not consider the behavior of write buffer management scheme. In this paper, we first show that log blocks and write buffer have a tight relationship to each other, which necessitates integrated management of both of them. Since log blocks also can be viewed as another type of write buffer, we can manage both of them as an integrated write buffer. Then we provide three design criteria for the integrated write buffer management scheme which can be very useful to SSD firmware designers.

• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.177-185
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a hybrid write buffer architecture comprised of DRAM and NVRAM on SSD and a write buffer algorithm for the hybrid write buffer architecture. Unlike other write buffer algorithms, the proposed algorithm considers read pages as well as write pages to improve the performance of storage devices because most actual workloads are read-write mixed workloads. Through effectively managing NVRAM pages, the proposed algorithm extends the endurance of SSD by reducing the number of erase operations on NAND flash memory. Our experimental results show that our algorithm improved the buffer hit ratio by up to 116.51% and reduced the number of erase operations of NAND flash memory by up to 56.66%.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.262-269
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• 2005

Semiconductor scientists and engineers ideally desire the faster but the cheaper non-volatile memory devices. In practice, no single device satisfies this desire because a faster device is expensive and a cheaper is slow. Therefore, in this paper, we use heterogeneous non-volatile memories and construct an efficient hierarchy for them. First, a small RAM device (e.g., MRAM, FRAM, and PRAM) is used as a write buffer of flash memory devices. Since the buffer is faster and does not have an erase operation, write can be done quickly in the buffer, making the write latency short. Also, if a write is requested to a data stored in the buffer, the write is directly processed in the buffer, reducing one write operation to flash storages. Second, we use many types of flash memories (e.g., SLC and MLC flash memories) in order to reduce the overall storage cost. Specifically, write requests are classified into two types, hot and cold, where hot data is vulnerable to be modified in the near future. Only hot data is stored in the faster SLC flash, while the cold is kept in slower MLC flash or NOR flash. The evaluation results show that the proposed hierarchy is effective at improving the access time of flash memory storages in a cost-effective manner thanks to the locality in memory accesses.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.16 no.10
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• pp.1-10
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• 2011

There are the large overhead of block erase and page write operations in NAND flash memory, though it has low power consumption, cheap prices and a large storage. Due to the physical characteristics of NAND flash memory, overwrite operations are not permitted at the same location, so rewriting operation require after erase operation. it cause performance decrease of NAND flash memory. Using SRAM buffer in traditional NAND flash memory, it can not only reduce effective write operation but also guarantee fast memory access time. In this paper, we proposed the small SRAM buffer management system for reducing overhead of NAND flash memory, that is, erase and write operations. The proposed buffer system in a NAND flash memory consists of two parts, i.e., a fully associative temporal buffer with the small fetching block size and a fully associative spatial buffer with the large fetching block size. The temporal buffer have small fetching blocks that referenced from spatial buffer. When it happen write operations or erase operations in NAND flash memory, the related fetching blocks in temporal buffer include a page or a block are written in NAND flash memory at the same time. The writing and erasing counts in NAND flash memory can be reduced. According to the simulation results, although we have high miss ratios, write and erase operations can be reduced approximatively 58% and 83% respectively. Also the average memory access times are improved about 84% compared with the fully associative buffer with two sizes.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.10 no.6
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• pp.72-79
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• 2010

In this paper, we propose the data cache architecture with a write buffer for a 32bit asynchronous embedded processor. The data cache consists of CAM and data memory. It accelerates data up lood cycle between the processor and the main memory that improves processor performance. The proposed data cache has 8 KB cache memory. The cache uses the 4-way set associative mapping with line size of 4 words (16 bytes) and pseudo LRU replacement algorithm for data replacement in the memory. Dirty register and write buffer is used for write policy of the cache. The designed data cache is synthesized to a gate level design using $0.13-{\mu}m$ process. Its average hit rate is 94%. And the system performance has been improved by 46.53%. The proposed data cache with write buffer is very suitable for a 32-bit asynchronous processor.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.24 no.7
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• pp.1-8
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• 2019

Recently, an SSD with hybrid buffer memories is actively researching to reduce the overall latency in server computing systems. However, existing hybrid buffer policies caused many swapping operations in pages because it did not consider the overall latency such as read/write operations of flash chips in the SSD. This paper proposes the clock with hybrid buffer memories (CLOCK-HBM) for a new hybrid buffer policy in the SSD with server computing systems. The CLOCK-HBM constructs new policies based on unique characteristics in both DRAM buffer and NVMs buffer for reducing the number of swapping operations in the SSD. In experimental results, the CLOCK-HBM reduced the number of swapping operations in the SSD by 43.5% on average, compared with LRU, CLOCK, and CLOCK-DNV.

• The Transactions of the Korea Information Processing Society
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• v.3 no.2
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• pp.407-415
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• 1996

This paper introduces two schemes to improve the frame buffer access bandwidth. The first scheme suggests a rasterizer called SBUFRE that has Span Z Buffer and Span Z＆ Color Buffer within a rasterizer. The second scheme suggests a ZDRAM that has Z-value comparator within the DRAM. These schemes are to convert read- modify-write Z buffer compare into single write only operation that improves approximately 50% frame buffer access bandwidth.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.151-160
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• 2018

NAND flash memories have the advantages of fast access speed, high density and low power consumption, thus they have increasing demand in embedded system and mobile environment. Despite the low power and fast speed gains of NAND flash memory, DRAM disk buffers were used because of the performance load and limited durability of NAND flash cell. However, DRAM disk buffers are not suitable for limited energy environments due to their high static energy consumption. In this paper, we propose WAP-LRU (Write pattern Analysis based Placement by LRU) hybrid disk buffer management policy. Our policy designates the buffer location in the hybrid memory by analyzing write pattern of the workloads to check the continuity of the page operations. In our simulation, WAP-LRU increased the lifetime of NAND flash memory by reducing the number of garbage collections by 63.1% on average. In addition, energy consumption is reduced by an average of 53.4% compared to DRAM disk buffers.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.37 no.1
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• pp.147-156
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• 2015

A typical solid-state drive contains several independent channels that can be operated in parallel. To exploit this channel-level parallelism, a variety of works proposed to split consecutive write sequences into small segments and schedule them to different channels. This scheme exploits the parallelism but breaks the spatial locality of write traffic; thus, it is able to significantly degrade the efficiency of garbage collection. This paper proposes a channel-aware write reordering (CAWR) mechanism to schedule write requests to different channels more intelligently. The novel mechanism encapsulates correlated pages into a cluster beforehand. All pages belonging to a cluster are scheduled to the same channels to exploit spatial locality, while different clusters are scheduled to different channels to exploit the parallelism. As CAWR covers both garbage collection and I/O performance, it outperforms existing schemes significantly. Trace-driven simulation results demonstrate that the CAWR mechanism reduces the average response time by 26% on average and decreases the valid page copies by 10% on average, while achieving a similar hit ratio to that of existing mechanisms.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.141-150
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• 2011

Recently the Solid State Drive (SSD) is widely used for storage system of various mobile devices. In this case, existing buffer replacement algorithms based on the hard disk do not consider characteristics of flash memory, so it caused performance degradation of the system. This paper proposes a novel buffer replacement policy called ABM (Asymmetric Buffer Management) policy. ABM policy separates read and write buffer space and applies different replacement unit and replacement algorithm for each buffer. In addition, write buffer delay scheme and dynamic size adaptation algorithm is applied for better performance. ABM outperforms other replacement policies, especially ABM-LRU-CLC shows 32% better performance than normal LRU policy.