Title: Error Characterization, Mitigation, and Recovery in Flash Memory Based Solid-State Drives,
Abstract: NAND flash memory is ubiquitous in everyday life today because its capacity
has continuously increased and cost has continuously decreased over decades.
This positive growth is a result of two key trends: (1) effective process
technology scaling, and (2) multi-level (e.g., MLC, TLC) cell data coding.
Unfortunately, the reliability of raw data stored in flash memory has also
continued to become more difficult to ensure, because these two trends lead to
(1) fewer electrons in the flash memory cell (floating gate) to represent the
data and (2) larger cell-to-cell interference and disturbance effects. Without
mitigation, worsening reliability can reduce the lifetime of NAND flash memory.
As a result, flash memory controllers in solid-state drives (SSDs) have become
much more sophisticated: they incorporate many effective techniques to ensure
the correct interpretation of noisy data stored in flash memory cells.
In this article, we review recent advances in SSD error characterization,
mitigation, and data recovery techniques for reliability and lifetime
improvement. We provide rigorous experimental data from state-of-the-art MLC
and TLC NAND flash devices on various types of flash memory errors, to motivate
the need for such techniques. Based on the understanding developed by the
experimental characterization, we describe several mitigation and recovery
techniques, including (1) cell-to-cell interference mitigation, (2) optimal
multi-level cell sensing, (3) error correction using state-of-the-art
algorithms and methods, and (4) data recovery when error correction fails. We
quantify the reliability improvement provided by each of these techniques.
Looking forward, we briefly discuss how flash memory and these techniques could
evolve into the future.