Low-power and Reliable Solid-state Drive with Inverted Limited Weight Coding

TL;DR

This paper introduces Inverted Limited Weight Coding (ILWC), a novel scheme that reduces energy consumption and enhances reliability in SSDs by increasing the number of low-voltage cells, leading to significant improvements in energy efficiency and data retention.

Contribution

The paper presents ILWC, a new coding scheme tailored for NAND flash cells that improves SSD energy efficiency and reliability by manipulating cell threshold voltages with added redundancy.

Findings

Over 20% reduction in program energy consumption.

More than 18% increase in data retention rate.

35% reduction in cell-to-cell coupling noise.

Abstract

In this work, we propose a novel coding scheme which based on the characteristics of NAND flash cells, generates codewords that reduce the energy consumption and improve the reliability of solid-state drives. This novel coding scheme, namely Inverted Limited Weight Coding (ILWC), favors a greater number of '1's appearing in its generated codewords at the cost of added information redundancy, as a form of flag bits. This increase in the number of bits valued as logical '1', in the generated codewords, will increase the number of cells that have lower threshold voltages. Through cells with lower threshold voltages, ILWC fruitfully reduces the SSD's program operation energy consumption. Moreover, it increases the SSD's data retention rate and reliability by decreasing the threshold voltage of the cells. The evaluation of our proposed coding method on three different SSDs, indicates more than 20% reduction in the SSD's program operation energy consumption. In addition, ILWC improves the cells' data retention rate by decreasing their intrinsic electric field by more than 18%. Moreover, the SSD's cell-to-cell coupling noise is diminished with the help of 35% reduction in the worst-case threshold voltage shift in a cell's adjacent cells. All this leads to 5.3% reduction in the MLC's cell error rate. In addition, ILWC achieves 37.5% improvement in the performance of the SSD program operation.