First Evidence of Temporary Read Errors in TLC 3D-NAND Flash Memories Exiting from an Idle State

This paper presents a new reliability threat that affects 3D-NAND Flash memories when a read operation is performed exiting from an idle state. In particular, a temporary large increase of the fail bits count is reported for the layers read as first after a sequence of program/verify and a idle retention phase. The phenomenon, hereafter called Temporary Read Errors (TRE), is not due to a permanent change of cell threshold voltage between the program verify and the following read operations, but to its transient instability occurring during the idle phase and the first read operations performed on a block. The experimental analysis has been performed on off-the-shelf gigabit-array products to characterize the dependence on the memory operating conditions. The TRE is found to be strongly dependent on the page read, on the read temperature and on the time delay between the first and the second read after the idle state. To emphasize its negative impact at system-level, we have evaluated the induced performance drop on Solid State Drives architectures.