• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.1-13
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• 2009

Flash memory is widely used as a storage medium of mobile devices such as MP3 players, cellular phones and digital cameras due to its tiny size, low power consumption and shock resistant characteristics. Currently, there are many studies to replace HDD with flash memory because of its numerous strong points. To use flash memory as a storage medium, FTL(Flash Translation Layer) is required since flash memory has erase-before-write constraints and sizes of read/write unit and erase unit are different from each other. Recently, new type of flash memory called "large block flash memory" is introduced. The large block flash memory has different physical structure and characteristics from previous flash memory. So existing FTLs are not efficiently operated on large block flash memory. In this paper, we propose an efficient FTL for large block flash memory based on FAST(Fully Associative Sector Translation) scheme and page-level mapping on data blocks.

• International Journal of Contents
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.22-29
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• 2010

In flash memory, many previous garbage collection methods only merge blocks statically and do not consider the contents of buffer. These schemes may cause more unnecessary block erase operations and page copy operations. However, since flash memory has the limitation of maximum rate and life cycle to delete each block, an efficient garbage collection method to evenly wear out the flash memory region is needed. This paper proposes a memory compaction scheme based on block-level buffer for flash memory. The proposed scheme not only merges the data blocks and the corresponding log block, but also searches for the block-level buffer to find the corresponding buffer blocks. Consequently, unnecessary potential page copying operations and block erasure operations could be reduced, thereby improving the performance of flash memory and prolonging the lifetime of flash memory.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.9
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• pp.1-8
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• 2017

In this paper, we propose a file system for flash memory which remedies shortcomings of existing flash memory file systems. Besides supporting large block size, the proposed file system reduces time in initializing file system significantly by adopting logical address comprised of erase block number and bitmap for pages in the block to find a page. The file system is suitable for embedded systems with limited main memory since it has small in-memory data structures. It also provides efficient management of obsolete blocks and free blocks, which contribute to the reduction of file update time. Finally the proposed file system can easily configure the maximum file size and file system size limits, which results in portability to emerging larger flash memories. By conducting performance evaluation studies, we show that the proposed file system can contribute to the performance improvement of embedded systems.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.12A no.7 s.97
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• pp.621-626
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• 2005

Recently, flash memory is widely used in various embedded applications since it has many advantages in terms of non-volatility, fast access speed, shock resistance, and low power consumption. However, it requires a software layer called FTL(Flash Translation Layer) due to its hardware characteristics. We present a new FTL algorithm named LSTAFF(Large State Transition Applied Fast flash Translation Layer) which is designed for large block flash memory The presented LSTAFF is adjusted to flash memory with pages which are larger than operating system data sector sizes and we provide performance results based on our implementation of LSTAFF and previous FTL algorithms using a flash simulator.

• 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.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.26-45
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• 2001

The Flash memory market: is an exciting market that has quickly over the last 10 years. Recently Flash memory provides a high-density. truly non-volatile, high performance read write memory solutions, also is characterized by low power consumption, extreme ruggedness and high reliability. Flash memory is an optimum solution for large nonvolitilc storage operations such as solid file storage, digital video recorder, digital still camera, The MP3 player and other portable multimedia communication applications requiring non-volatility. Regardless of the type of Flash memory, Flash media management software is always required to manage the larger Flash memory block partitions. This is true, since Flash memory cannot be erased on the byte level common to memory, but must be erased on a block granularity. The management of a Flash memory manager requires a keen understanding of a Flash technology and data management methods. Though Flash memory's write performance is relatively slow, the suggested algorithm offers a higher maximum write performance. Algorithms so far developed is not suitable for applications which is requiring more fast and frequent accesses. But, the proposed algorithm is focused on the justifiable operation even in the circumstance of fast and frequent accesses.

• 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 the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.315-320
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• 2009

Since flash memory can not be overwritten on updating data, new data are updated in new area and old data should be invalidated and erased for garbage collection. With develop of flash memory technology, capacity of flash memory is rapidly increasing. It increases rapidly execution time of CPU to search an entire flash memory of large capacity when choosing the block to erase in garbage collection. To solve the problem that is increasing execution time of CPU, flash memory is partitioned into several groups, the block to erase in garbage collection is searched within the corresponding group. In workload of access locality, we enhanced wear-leveling within group by allocating hot data to hot group and cold data to cold group respectively and enhanced wear-leveling among groups by exchanging periodically hot group and cold group.

• ETRI Journal
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.790-798
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• 2008

Recently, NAND flash memory has emerged as a next generation storage device because it has several advantages, such as low power consumption, shock resistance, and so on. However, it is necessary to use a flash translation layer (FTL) to intermediate between NAND flash memory and conventional file systems because of the unique hardware characteristics of flash memory. This paper proposes a new clustered FTL (CFTL) that uses clustered hash tables and a two-level software cache technique. The CFTL can anticipate consecutive addresses from the host because the clustered hash table uses the locality of reference in a large address space. It also adaptively switches logical addresses to physical addresses in the flash memory by using block mapping, page mapping, and a two-level software cache technique. Furthermore, anticipatory I/O management using continuity counters and a prefetch scheme enables fast address translation. Experimental results show that the proposed address translation mechanism for CFTL provides better performance in address translation and memory space usage than the well-known NAND FTL (NFTL) and adaptive FTL (AFTL).

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.8
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• pp.758-762
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• 2008

Embedded systems usually utilize Flash Memories with very nice characteristics of non-volatility, low access time, low power and so on. For the multimedia database systems, R-tree is an indexing tree with nice characteristics for multimedia access. MR-tree, which is an upgraded version of R-tree, has shown better performance in searching, inserting and deleting operations than R-tree. Flash memory has sectors and blocks as a unit of read, write and delete operations. Especially, the delete is done on a unit of 512 byte blocks with very large operation time and it is also known that read and write operations on a unit of block matches caching nature of MT-tree. Our research optimizes MR-tree operations in a unit of Flash memory blocks. Such an adjusting leads in better indexing performance in database accesses. With MR-tree on a 512B block units we achieved fast search time of database indexing with low height of MR-tree as well as faster update time of database indexing with the best fit of flash memory blocks. Thus MR-tree with optimized operations shows good characteristics to be a database index schemes on any systems with flash memory.