• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.22 no.5
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• pp.1-9
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• 2017

Recently, flash memory has been in a great demand from embedded system sectors for storage devices. However, program/erase (P/E) cycles per block are limited on flash memory. For the limited number of P/E cycles, many wear leveling techniques are studied. They prolonged the life time of flash memory using information tables. As one of the techniques, block erase table (BET) method using a bit array table was studied for embedded devices. However, it has a disadvantage in that performance of wear leveling is sharply low, when the consumption of memory is reduced. To solve this problem, we propose a novel wear leveling technique using Sampling-based Block Erase Table (SBET). SBET relates one bit of the bit array table to each block by using exclusive OR operation with round robin function. Accordingly, SBET enhances accuracy of cold block information and can prevent to decrease the performance of wear leveling. In our experiment, SBET prolongs life time of flash memory by up to 88%, compared with previous techniques which use a bit array table.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.20 no.11
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• pp.1-8
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• 2015

Flash memory has advantages in that it is fast access speed, low-power, and low-price. Therefore, they are widely used in electronics industry sectors. However, the flash memory has weak points, which are the limited number of erase operations and non-in-place update problem. To overcome the limited number of erase operations, many wear leveling techniques are studied. They use many tables storing information such as erase count of blocks, hot and cold block indicators, reference count of pages, and so on. These tables occupy some space of main memory for the wear leveling techniques. Accordingly, they are not appropriate for low-power devices limited main memory. In order to resolve it, a wear leveling technique using bit array and Bit Set Threshold (BST) for flash memory. The proposing technique reduces the used space of main memory using a bit array table, which saves the history of block erase operations. To enhance accuracy of cold block information, we use BST, which is calculated by using the number of invalid pages of the blocks in a one-to-many mode, where one bit is related to many blocks. The performance results illustrate that the proposed wear leveling technique improve life time of flash memory to about 6%, compared with previous wear leveling techniques using a bit array table in our experiment.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea CI
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• v.46 no.4
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• pp.21-30
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• 2009

Fusion flash memory such as OneNAND$^{TM}$ is popular as a ubiquitous storage device for embedded systems because it has advantages of NAND and NOR flash memory that it can support large capacity, fast read/write performance and XIP(eXecute-In-Place). Besides, OneNAND$^{TM}$ provides not only advantages of hybrid structure but also multi-block erase function that improves slow erase performance by erasing the multiple blocks simultaneously. But traditional NAND Flash Translation Layer may not fully support it because the garbage collection of traditional FTL only considers a few block as victim block and erases them. In this paper, we propose an Erase Group Flash Translation Layer for improving multi-block erase function. EGFTL uses a superblock scheme for enhancing garbage collection performance and invalid block management to erase multiple blocks simultaneously. Also, it uses clustered hash table to improve the address translation performance of the superblock scheme. The experimental results show that the garbage collection performance of EGFTL is 30% higher than those of traditional FTLs, and the address translation performance of EGFTL is 5% higher than that of Superblock scheme.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 2003.11b
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• pp.15-18
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• 2003

Flash memory becomes more important for its fast access speed, low-power, shock resistance and nonvolatile storage. But its native restrictions that have limited 1ifetime, inability of update in place, different size unit of read/write and erase operations need to managed by FTL(Flash Translation Layer). FTL has to control the wear-leveling, address mapping, bad block management of flash memory. In this paper, we focuses on the fast access to address mapping table and proposed the way of faster valid page search in the flash memory using the VPLT(Valid Page Lookup Table). This method is expected to decrease the frequency of access of flash memory that have an significant effect on performance of read and block-transfer operations. For the validations, we implemented the FTL based on Windows CE platform and obtained an improved result.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.19D no.2
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• pp.161-186
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• 2012

Recently, the flash memory consistently increases the storage capacity while the price of the memory is being cheap. This makes the mass storage SSD(Solid State Drive) popular. The flash memory, however, has a lot of defects. In order that these defects should be complimented, it is needed to use the FTL(Flash Translation Layer) as a special layer. To operate restrictions of the hardware efficiently, the FTL that is essential to work plays a role of transferring from the logical sector number of file systems to the physical sector number of the flash memory. Especially, the poor performance is attributed to Erase-Before-Write among the flash memory's restrictions, and even if there are lots of studies based on the log block, a few problems still exists in order for the mass storage flash memory to be operated. If the FAST based on Log Block-Based Flash often is generated in the wide locality causing the random writing, the merge operation will be occur as the sectors is not used in the data block. In other words, the block thrashing which is not effective occurs and then, the flash memory's performance get worse. If the log-block makes the overwriting caused, the log-block is executed like a cache and this technique contributes to developing the flash memory performance improvement. This study for the improvement of the random writing demonstrates that the log block is operated like not only the cache but also the entire flash memory so that the merge operation and the erase operation are diminished as there are a distinct mapping table called as the offset mapping table for the operation. The new FTL is to be defined as the XAST(extensively-Associative Sector Translation). The XAST manages the offset mapping table with efficiency based on the spatial locality and temporal locality.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.476-487
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• 2007

Flash memory offers attractive features, such as non-volatile, shock resistance, fast access, and low power consumption for data storage. However, it has one main drawback of requiring an erase before updating the contents. Furthermore, flash memory can only be erased limited number of times. To overcome limitations, flash memory needs a software layer called flash translation layer (FTL). The basic function of FTL is to translate the logical address from the file system like file allocation table (FAT) to the physical address in flash memory. In this paper, a new FTL algorithm called an efficient and advanced space-management technique (EAST) is proposed. EAST improves the performance by optimizing the number of log blocks, by applying the state transition, and by using reallocation blocks. The results of experiments show that EAST outperforms FAST, which is an enhanced log block scheme, particularly when the usage of flash memory is not full.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.18A no.4
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• pp.135-142
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• 2011

This research is to design an effective buffer structure and its management for flash memory based high performance SSDs (Solid State Disks). Specifically conventional SSDs tend to show asymmetrical performance in read and /write operations, in addition to a limited number of erase operations. To minimize the number of erase operations and write latency, the degree of interleaving levels over multiple flash memory chips should be maximized. Thus, to increase the interleaving effect, an effective buffer structure is proposed for the SSD with a hybrid address mapping scheme and super-block management. The proposed buffer operation is designed to provide performance improvement and enhanced flash memory life cycle. Also its management is based on a new selection scheme to determine random and sequential accesses, depending on execution characteristics, and a method to enhance the size of sequential access unit by aggressive merging. Experiments show that a newly developed mapping table under the MBA is more efficient than the basic simple management in terms of maintenance and performance. The overall performance is increased by around 35% in comparison with the basic simple management.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartD
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• v.17D no.6
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• pp.383-394
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• 2010

Flash memory based SSDs are currently being considered as a promising candidate for replacing hard disks due to several superior features such as shorter access time, lower power consumption and better shock resistance. However, SSDs have different characteristics from hard disk such as difference of unit and time for read, write and erase operation and impossibility for over-writing. Because of these reasons, SSDs have disadvantages on hard disk based systems, so FTL(Flash Translation Layer) is designed to increase SSDs' efficiency. In this paper, we propose an advanced logical address mapping method for increasing SSDs' performance, which is named HAMM(Hybrid Address Mapping Method). HAMM addresses drawbacks of previous block-mapping method and super-block-mapping method and takes advantages of them. We experimented our method on our own SSDs simulator. In the experiments, we confirmed that HAMM uses storage area more efficiently than super-block-mapping method, given the same buffer size. In addition, HAMM used smaller memory than block-mapping method to construct mapping table, demonstrating almost same performance.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.185-192
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• 2017

Due to the characteristics of low power, high durability and high density, NAND flash memory is being heavily used in various type of devices such as USB, SD card, smart phone and SSD. On the other hand, because of another characteristic of flash cell with the limited number of program/erase cycles, NAND flash memory has a short lifetime compared to other storage devices. To overcome the lifetime problem, many researches related to the wear leveling have been conducted. This paper presents a method called a TCB (Tracking Cold Blocks) using more reinforced constraint conditions when classifying cold blocks than previous works. TCB presented in this paper keeps a MCT (Migrated Cold block Table) to manage the enhanced classification process of cold blocks, with which unnecessary migrations of pages can be reduced much more. Through the experiments, we show that TCB reduces the overhead of wear leveling by about 30% and increases the lifetime up to about 60% compared to BET and BST.