Copycat: A High Precision Real Time NAND Simulator

TL;DR

Copycat is a high-precision, real-time NAND simulator designed for commodity multi-core desktops, enabling reliable development and testing of flash memory management software with minimal response time deviation.

Contribution

It introduces a high-precision NAND simulator that operates in real-time on standard hardware, supporting fault injection and close-to-real response times.

Findings

Response time deviation under 0.28% compared to FPGA

Supports comprehensive fault injection for testing

Operates efficiently on commodity multi-core desktops

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a high precision real time NAND simulator called Copycat that runs on a commodity multi-core desktop environment. This NAND simulator facilitates the development of embedded flash memory management software such as the flash translation layer (FTL). The simulator also allows a comprehensive fault injection for testing the reliability of the FTL. Compared against a real FPGA implementation, the simulator's response time deviation is under 0.28% on average, with a maximum of 10.12%.