A Real-Time Non-Volatile Memory Analyzer and its Use on the Evaluation of Storage Devices based on NAND Flash Memories

In computing systems that use non-volatile memory as their storage medium, high-level functions are translated into a sequence of commands at the memory chip level. Acquiring and processing these commands, and especially their time-sequence, along with commands captured at higher software layers, is essential for analyzing the internal functionality and optimizing the performance of the storage device. In this work, we present a non-volatile memory analyzer, an instrument that processes in real-time the commands applied at the interface of a non-volatile memory chip and by combining higher-level commands highlights and analyzes the internal data flow of the whole computing system. The case of NAND Flash memories is explained in more details and experimental results demonstrate the usefulness of the presented analyzer.