ALARM: A Location-Aware Redistribution Method to Improve 3D FG NAND Flash Reliability

Abstract

3D NAND flash memory is enjoying an increasing popularity as it dramatically increases the bit density, presenting a grand opportunity to satisfy the growing demand on the storage capacity. However, this vertically stacked structure also introduces more serious read disturb problems compared with planar flash devices. Characterization results show that the read disturb errors on 3D floating gate (FG) MLC NAND flash chips exhibit a large discrepancy on the locations and types of pages, implying that pages should not be treated equally when designing migration schemes. This paper makes a thorough observation on read access characteristics by analyzing contemporary workloads collected from a wide range of applications with various read ratios. Based on the characterization results, we build a read disturb error model and propose a location-aware redistribution method (ALARM) that utilizes the intrinsic characteristics of the 3D floating gate NAND flash and redistributes read-hot pages to locations inducing less read disturb errors to improve its reliability. We implement the read disturb error model and our proposed design on an event-driven simulator, and the experimental results show that ALARM can reduce the maximum and average raw bit error rates (RBERs) by up to 99.49% and 91.80% with an operation overhead of 0.70%.