Error Rate-Based Wear-Leveling for NAND Flash Memory at Highly Scaled Technology Nodes

This brief presents a NAND Flash memory wear-leveling algorithm that explicitly uses memory raw bit error rate (BER) as the optimization target. Although NAND Flash memory wear-leveling has been well studied, all the existing algorithms aim to equalize the number of programming/erase cycles among all the memory blocks. Unfortunately, such a conventional design practice becomes increasingly suboptimal as inter-block variation becomes increasingly significant with the technology scaling. This brief presents a dynamic BER-based greedy wear-leveling algorithm that uses BER statistics as the measurement of memory block wear-out pace, and guides dynamic memory block data swapping to fully maximize the wear-leveling efficiency. Simulations have been carried out to quantitatively demonstrate its advantages over existing wear-leveling algorithms.