Temperature Impacts on Endurance and Read Disturbs in Charge-Trap 3D NAND Flash Memories

Temperature effects should be well considered when designing flash-based memory systems, because they are a fundamental factor that affect both the performance and the reliability of NAND flash memories. In this work, aiming to comprehensively understanding the temperature effects on 3D NAND flash memory, triple-level-cell (TLC) mode charge-trap (CT) 3D NAND flash memory chips were characterized systematically in a wide temperature range (−30~70 °C), by focusing on the raw bit error rate (RBER) degradation during program/erase (P/E) cycling (endurance) and frequent reading (read disturb). It was observed that (1) the program time showed strong dependences on the temperature and P/E cycles, which could be well fitted by the proposed temperature-dependent cycling program time (TCPT) model; (2) RBER could be suppressed at higher temperatures, while its degradation weakly depended on the temperature, indicating that high-temperature operations would not accelerate the memory cells’ degradation; (3) read disturbs were much more serious at low temperatures, while it helped to recover a part of RBER at high temperatures.

A Low-Cost Improved Method of Raw Bit Error Rate Estimation for NAND Flash Memory of High Storage Density

Cells wear fast in NAND flash memory of high storage density (HSD), so it is very necessary to have a long-term frequent in-time monitoring on its raw bit error rate (RBER) changes through a fast RBER estimation method. As the flash of HSD already has relatively lower reading speed, the method should not further degrade its read performance. This paper proposes an improved estimation method utilizing known data comparison, includes interleaving to balance the uneven error distribution in the flash of HSD, a fast RBER estimation module to make the estimated RBER highly linearly correlated with the actual RBER, and enhancement strategies to accelerate the decoding convergence of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and thereby make up the rate penalty caused by the known data. Experimental results show that when RBER is close to the upper bound of LDPC code, the reading efficiency can be increased by 35.8% compared to the case of no rate penalty. The proposed method only occupies 0.039mm2 at 40nm process condition. Hence, the fast, read-performance-improving, and low-cost method is of great application potential on RBER monitoring in the flash of HSD.