Improving 3D NAND Flash Memories Reliability: a Cross-Layer Perspective

The 3D NAND Flash memory technology is the main building block of storage architectures such as multimedia cards and Solid-State Drives. Applications ranging from mobile to high-performance computing are continuously calling for an increased storage density, requiring massive scaling efforts at the device and array level. This leads to a natural degradation of the functional metrics of the technology while exposing new reliability issues that jeopardize the inherent memory trade-off with performance. A simple device optimization would be insufficient to tackle the problem. In this work, we show through some case studies how a cross-layer approach spanning from devices and circuits to system-level optimizations is mandatory for future storage systems development.