에러 분포의 비대칭성을 활용한 대용량 3D NAND 플래시 메모리의 신뢰성 최적화 기법

초록

Recent advances in flash technologies, such as 3D processing and multileveling schemes, have successfully increased the flash capacity. Unfortunately, these technology advances significantly degrade flash’s reliability due to a smaller cell geometry and a finer-grained cell state control. In this paper, we propose an asymmetric BER-aware reliability optimization technique (aBARO), new flash optimization that improves the flash reliability. To this end, we first reveal that bit errors of 3D NAND flash memory are highly skewed among flash cell states. The proposed aBARO exploits the unique per-state error model in flash cell states by selecting the most error-prone flash states and by forming narrow threshold voltage distributions (for the selected states only). Furthermore, aBARO is applied only when the program time (tPROG) gets shorter when a flash cell becomes aging, thereby keeping the program latency of storage systems unchanged. Our experimental results with real 3D MLC and TLC flash devices show that aBARO can effectively improve flash reliability by mitigating a significant number of bit errors. In addition, aBARO can also reduce the read latency by 40%, on average, by suppressing the read retries.

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