• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.17-21
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• 2008

Application of flash memory in mobile and ubiquitous related devices is rapidly being increased due to its low price and high performance. In addition, some notebook computers currently come out into market with a SSD(Solid State Disk) instead of hard-drive based storage system. Regarding this trend, applications need to increase the storage capacity using multiple flash memory chips for larger capacity sooner or later. Flash memory based storage subsystem should resolve the performance bottleneck for writing in perspective of speed and lifetime according to its physical property. In order to make flash memory storage work with tangible performance, reclaiming of invalid regions needs to be controlled in a particular manner to decrease the number of erasures and to distribute the erasures uniformly over the whole memory space as much as possible. In this paper, we study the performance of flash memory recycling algorithms and demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows acceptable performance for flash memory storage with multiple chips. The proposed cleaning method partitions the memory space into candidate memory regions, to be reclaimed as free, by utilizing threshold values. The proposed algorithm handles the storage system in multi-layered style. The impact of the proposed policies is evaluated through a number of experiments.

• IEMEK Journal of Embedded Systems and Applications
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• v.6 no.5
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• pp.263-272
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• 2011

The complexity of flash memory based storage systems is high due to diverse host interfaces and other design choices such as mapping granularity, flash memory controller execution models and so on. Thus, it is possible that the actual performance after implementation is not consistent with the target performance. This paper demonstrates that the performance prediction of flash memory based storage systems is possible through performance modeling that takes into account various design parameters. In the performance modeling, the FTL, which is the core element of flash memory based storage systems, is modeled as a set of (copy-on-write) logs and their interactions. Also, the flash memory controller is modeled based on the classification proposed in the design of the Ozone flash controller. In this study, the performance model has been implemented using Simulink and experimental results are presented and analyzed.

• Journal of Information Technology Applications and Management
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.189-200
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• 2004

Recently Flash Memory which is small and low-powered is widely used as a storage of embedded system, because an embedded system requests portability and a fast response. To resolve a difference of access time between a storage and RAM, Linux is using disk caching which copies a part of file on disk into RAM. It is not also an exception on embedded system. A READ access-time of flash memory is similar to RAMs. So, when a process on an embedded system reads data, it is similar to the time to access cached data in RAM and to access directly data on a flash memory. On the embedded system using limited memory, using a disk cache is that wastes much time and memory spaces to manage it and can not reflects the characteristic of a flash memory. This paper proposes the regular file access of limited using a page cache in the file system based on a flash memory and reflects the characteristic of a flash memory. The proposed algorithm minimizes power consumption because access numbers of the RAM are reduced and doesn't waste a memory space because it accesses directly to a flash memory Therefore, the performance improvement of the system applying the proposed algorithm is expected.

• Journal of Computing Science and Engineering
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.181-194
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• 2009

Flash memory is increasingly being used in a wide range of storage applications because of its low power consumption, low access latency, small form factor, and high shock resistance. However, the current platforms for flash memory software development do not meet the ever-increasing requirements of flash memory applications. This paper presents three different hardware platforms for flash memory/NVRAM (non-volatile RAM) software development that overcome the limitations of the current platforms. The three platforms target different types of host system and provide various features that facilitate the development and verification of flash memory/NVRAM software. In this paper, we also demonstrate the usefulness of the three platforms by implementing three different types of storage system (one for each platform) based on them.

• Transactions of the Society of Information Storage Systems
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.7-12
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• 2011

The flash memory has been remarked as the next generation media of portable and desktop computers' storage devices. Their features include non-volatility, low power consumption, and fast access time for read operations, which are sufficient to present flash memories as major data storage components for desktop and servers. The purpose of our study is to upgrade a traditional mirroring scheme based on SSD storages due to the relatively slow or freezing characteristics of write operations, as compared to fast read operations. For this work, we propose a new storage management scheme called Memory Mirror-Switching based on traditional mirroring scheme. Our Mirror-Switching scheme improves flash operation performance by switching write-workloads from flash memory to RAM and delaying write operations to avoid freezing. Our test results show that our scheme significantly reduces the write operation delay and storage freezing.

• Journal of The Institute of Information and Telecommunication Facilities Engineering
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.115-120
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• 2011

Recently flash memory is widely used in various mobile devices as storage medium. Nonvolatile memory can be divided into two categories: NAND- and NOR-type flash memory. NOR flash memory is mainly used to store instruction codes for operation; while NAND for data storage. However, NAND does show more economical benefits, that is, it is approximately 30~40% cheaper than NOR flash. Therefore it can be useful to improve NAND flash performance by replacing NOR flash with NAND flash combining with various buffer systems.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.47-58
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• 2005

There are two major type of flash memory products, namely, NAND-type and NOR-type flash memory. NOR-type flash memory is generally deployed as ROM BIOS code storage because if offers Byte I/O and fast read operation. However, NOR-type flash memory is more expensive than NAND-type flash memory in terms of the cost per byte ratio, and hence NAND type flash memory is more widely used as large data storage such as embedded Linux file systems. In this paper, we designed an efficient flash memory file system based an Embedded system and presented to make up for reduced to Swapping a weak System Performance to flash file system using NAND-type flash memory, then proposed Swapping algorithm insured to an Execution time. Based on Implementation and simulation studies, Then, We improved performance bases on NAND-type flash memory to the requirement of the embedded system.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.767-774
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• 2010

Due to advantages of NAND flash memory such as non-volatility, low access latency, low energy consumption, light weight, small size and shock resistance, it has become a better alternative over traditional magnetic disk drives, and has been widely used. Traditional DBMSs including mobile DBMSs may run on flash memory without any modification by using Flash Translation Layer (FTL), which emulates a random access block device to hide the characteristics of flash memory such as "erase-before-update". However, most existing FTLs are optimized for file systems, not for DBMSs, and traditional DBMSs are not aware of them. Also, traditional DBMSs do not consider the characteristics of flash memory. In this paper, we propose a flash-conscious storage system for DBMSs that utilizes flash memory as a main storage medium, and carefully put the characteristics of flash memory into considerations. The proposed flash-conscious storage system exploits log records to avoid costly update operations. It is shown that the proposed storage system outperforms the state.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.13 no.7
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• pp.508-519
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• 2007

Flash memory based storage has been used in various mobile systems and now is to be used in Laptop computers in the name of Solid State Disk. The Flash memory has not only merits in terms of weight, shock resistance, and power consumption but also limitations like erase-before-write property. To overcome these limitations, Flash memory based storage requires special address mapping software called FTL(Flash-memory Translation Layer), which often performs merge operation for block recycling. In order to reduce block recycling cost in NAND Flash memory based storage, we introduce another block recycling scheme which we call migration. As a result, the FTL can select either merge or migration depending on their costs for each block recycling. Experimental results with Postmark benchmark and embedded system workload show that this cost-based selection of migration/merge operation improves the performance of Flash memory based storage. Also, we present a solution of macroscopic optimal migration/merge sequence that minimizes a block recycling cost for each migration/merge combination period. Experimental results show that the performance of Flash memory based storage can be more improved by the macroscopic optimization than the simple cost-based selection.

• 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.