PVSensing: A Process-Variation-Aware Space Allocation Strategy for 3D NAND Flash Memory

Three-dimensional (3D) flash memory is an emerging memory technology that enables a number of improvements to conventional planar NAND flash memory, including larger capacity, less program disturb, and lower access latency. Despite these advantages, 3D flash memory brings a number of new challenges. First, in 3D flash memory, NAND strings punch through multiple stacked layers to form the 3D infrastructure. Current etching process is unable to manufacture perfect channels with identical feature size. Second, with more stacked layers, the cell current in 3D flash memory is only 20% compared to planar flash memory, making it difficult to give a reliable sensing margin. These issues are affected by process variation, and they pose threats to the integrity of data stored in 3D flash memory. This article present
PVSensing
, a process-variation-aware space allocation strategy for open-channel SSD with 3D charge-trap flash memory. PVSensing is a novel hardware and file system interface that can transparently allocate physical space in the presence of process variation. PVSensing utilizes the rich functionalities provided by the system infrastructure of open-channel SSD to reduce the uncorrectable bit errors. Three reliability enhancement strategies (i.e., the adaptive creation of fault cubes, the physical block mining, and the live migration of write requests) are proposed. We demonstrate the viability of the proposed technique using a set of extensive experiments. Experimental results show that PVSensing can effectively reduce uncorrectable bit errors, and improve the reliability of critical data with negligible extra erase operations in comparison with representative schemes.