• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.49 no.4
• /
• pp.26-33
• /
• 2012

As the flash memory has increased the market share of data storage in imbedded system and occupied the most of area in a system, It has a profound impact on system reliability. Flash memory is divided NOR/NAND-type according to the cell array structure, and is classified as SLC(Single Level Cell)/MLC(Multi Level Cell) according to reference voltage. Although NAND-type flash memory is slower than NOR-type, but it has large capacity and low cost. Also, By the effect of demanding mobile market, MLC NAND-type is widely adopted for the purpose of the multimedia data storage. Accordingly, Importance of fault detection algorithm is increasing to ensure MLC NAND-type flash memory reliability. There are many researches about the testing algorithm used from traditional RAM to SLC flash memory and it detected a lot of errors. But the case of MLC flash memory, testing for fault detection, there was not much attempt. So, In this paper, Extend SLC NAND-type flash memory fault detection algorithm for testing MLC NAND-type flash memory and try to reduce these differences.

• Journal of KIISE
• /
• v.44 no.11
• /
• pp.1130-1137
• /
• 2017

The multi-leveling technique that stores multiple bits in a single memory cell has significantly improved the density of NAND flash memory along with shrinking processes. However, because of the side effects of the multi-leveling technique, the average write performance of MLC NAND flash memory is degraded more than twice that of SLC NAND flash memory. In this paper, we introduce existing cross-layer optimization techniques proposed to improve the performance of MLC NAND flash-based storages, and propose a new integration technique that overcomes the limitations of existing techniques by exploiting their complementarity. By fully exploiting the performance asymmetry in MLC NAND flash devices at the flash translation layer, the proposed technique can handle many write requests with the performance of SLC NAND flash devices, thus significantly improving the performance of NAND flash-based storages. Experimental results show that the proposed technique improves performance 39% on average over individual techniques.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.51 no.3
• /
• pp.61-71
• /
• 2014

As the occupancy rate of the flash memory increases in the storage media market for the embedded system and the semi-conductor industry grows, the demand and supply of flash memory is increasing by a big margin. They are especially used in large quantity in the smart phones, tablets, PC, SSD and Soc(System on Chip) etc. The flash memory is divided into the NOR type and NAND type according to the cell arrangement structure and the NAND type is divided into the SLC(Single Level Cell) and MLC(Multi Level Cell) according to the number of bits that can be stored in each cell. Many tests have been performed on NOR type such as BIST(Bulit-In Self Test) and BIRA(Bulit-In Redundancy Analysis) etc, but there is little study on the NAND type. For the case of the existing BIST, the test can be proceeded using external equipments like ATE of high price. However, this paper is an attempt for the improvement of credibility and harvest rate of the system by proposing the BIST for the MLC NAND type flash memory of Finite State Machine structure on which the pattern test can be performed without external equipment since the necessary patterns are embedded in the interior and which uses the MLC NAND March(x) algorithm and pattern which had been proposed for the MLC NAND type flash memory.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
• /
• v.59 no.6
• /
• pp.1095-1102
• /
• 2010

This paper presents an equalizer reducing CCI(cell-to-cell interference) in MLC NAND flash memory. High growth of the flash memory market has been driven by two combined technological efforts that are an aggressive scaling technique which doubles the memory density every year and the introduction of MLC(multi level cell) technology. Therefore, the CCI is a critical factor which affects occurring data errors in cells. We introduced an equation of CCI model and designed an equalizer reducing CCI based on the proposed equation. In the model, we have been considered the floating gate capacitance coupling effect, the direct field effect, and programming methods of the MLC NAND flash memory. Also we design and verify the proposed equalizer using Matlab. As the simulation result, the error correction ratio of the equalizer shows about 20% under 20nm NAND process where the memory channel model has serious CCI.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.48 no.10
• /
• pp.46-53
• /
• 2011

This paper presents an equalizer reducing CCI(cell-to-cell interference) in MLC NAND flash memory. The CCI is a critical factor which affects occurring data errors in a cell, when surrounding cells are programed. We derived a characteristic equation for CCI considering write procedure of data that is similar with signal equalizing. The model considers the floating gate capacitance coupling effect, the direct field effect, and programming methods of the MLC NAND flash memory. We verify the proposed equalizer comparing with the measured data of 1-block MLC NAND flash memory. As the simulation result, the equalizer shows an error correction ratio about 60% under 20nm NAND process.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics and Information Engineers
• /
• v.51 no.12
• /
• pp.72-82
• /
• 2014

Recently, the size of semiconductor industry market is constantly growing, due to the increase in diffusion of smart-phone, tablet PC and SSD(Solid State Drive). Also, it is expected that the demand for TLC NAND-type flash memory would gradually increase, with the recent release of TLC NAND-type flash memory in the SSD market. There have been a lot of studies on SLC NAND flash memory, but no research on TLC NAND flash memory has been conducted, yet. Also, a test of NAND-type flash memory is depending on a high-priced external equipment. Therefore, this study aims to suggest a structure for an autonomous test with no high-priced external test device by modifying the existing SLC NAND flash memory and MLC NAND flash memory test algorithms and patterns and applying them to TLC NAND flash memory.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
• /
• v.48 no.10
• /
• pp.25-32
• /
• 2011

We have analyzed adjacent cell dependency of threshold voltage shift caused by the cell to cell interference, and we proposed a 3-adjacent-cell model to model the pattern dependency of the threshold voltage shift. The proposed algorithm is verified by using MATLAB simulation and measurement results. In the experimental results, we found that accuracy of the proposed simple 3-adjacient-cell model is comparable to the widely used conventional 8-adjacient-cell model. The Bit Error Rate (BER) of LSB and of MSB is improved by 28.9% and 19.8%, respectively, by applying the proposed algorithm based on 3-adjacent-cell model to 20nm-class 2-bit MLC NAND flash memories.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
• /
• v.39A no.3
• /
• pp.127-139
• /
• 2014

In this paper, we present two signal processing techniques for designing binary error correction codes for Multi-Level Cell(MLC) NAND flash memory. MLC NAND flash memory saves the non-binary symbol at each cell and shows asymmetric channel LLR l-density which makes it difficult to design soft-decision binary error correction codes such as LDPC codes and Polar codes. Therefore, we apply density mirroring and EM algorithm for approximating the MLC NAND flash memory channel to the binary-input memoryless channel. The density mirroring processes channel LLRs to satisfy roughly all-zero codeword assumption, and then EM algorithm is applied to l-density after density mirroring for approximating it to mixture of symmetric Gaussian densities. These two signal processing techniques make it possible to use conventional code design algorithms, such as density evolution and EXIT chart, for MLC NAND flash memory channel.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Computer Information Conference
• /
• 2018.07a
• /
• pp.357-359
• /
• 2018

최근 메모리 반도체 시장은 SD(Secure Digital) 메모리 카드, SSD(Solid State Drive)등의 보급률 증가로 메모리 반도체의 시장이 대규모로 증가하고 있다. 메모리 반도체는 개인용 컴퓨터 뿐만 아니라 스마프폰, 테플릿 PC, 교육용 임베디드 보드 등 다양한 산업에서 이용 되고 있다. 또한 메모리 반도체 생산 업체가 대규모로 메모리 반도체 산업에 투자하면서 메모리 반도체 시장은 대규모로 성장되었다. 플래시 메모리는 크게 NAND-Type과 NOR-Type으로 나뉘며 플로팅 게이트 셀의 전압의 따라 SLC(Single Level Cell)과 MLC(Multi Level Cell) 그리고 TLC(Triple Level Cell)로 구분 된다. SLC 및 MLC NAND-Type 플래시 메모리는 많은 연구가 진행되고 이용되고 있지만, TLC NAND-Tpye 플래시 메모리는 많은 연구가 진행되고 있지 않다. 본 논문에서는 기존에 제안된 SLC 및 MLC NAND-Type 플래시 메모리에서 제안된 큐브 패턴을 TLC NAND-Type 플래시 메모리에서 적용 가능한 큐브 패턴 및 알고리즘을 제안한다.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.321-328
• /
• 2016

Typical MLC NAND flash devices are considered less reliable than SLC NAND flash devices. Although raw bit error rate (RBER) of MLC flash had been considered approximately 1000times or more higher than that of SLC flash, recent research conducted on Google's data center shows that it is much lower than such expectation. Based on the research, we devised In Drive Data Duplication (IDDD) scheme that efficiently exploit MLC flash's sufficient capacity to improve its data reliability without structural complexity increment using SSD intrinsic firmware layer, and showed the data reliability expectation of MLC flash could be significantly higher than that of SLC flash from measured and calculated error rates. Even though RBER of SLC flash was lower than that of MLC flash in 44 out of 48 cases we studied, applying IDDD scheme, RBER of MLC flash was became lower than that of SLC in all 48 cases and uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER) of MLC flash was became lower than that of SLC flash in 45 out of 48 cases.