Retention Trimming for Lifetime Improvement of Flash Memory Storage Systems

NAND flash memory has been widely deployed in embedded systems, personal computers, and data centers. While recent technology scaling and density improvement have reduced its price, they have also significantly shortened its endurance. In this paper, with the understanding of the relationship between data retention time and flash wearing, a retention trimming approach, which trims data retention time based on the data lifetime, is proposed to reduce the wearing of flash memory, and hence improve the endurance of flash memory. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves significant endurance improvements.