Tutorial: NAND Flash Memory Design and Architecture Trends

“NAND flash technology has come to dominate the nonvolatile memory market due to its low cost and high capacity. In the early days, it was used in media storage devices, an application in which its low read/write performance was acceptable. As we head into the future, new systems will demand faster storage, which will require new approaches to improve NAND flash performance. This tutorial will cover the basics of NAND flash memory and provide an understanding of how its performance compares with conventional memory. Techniques to accelerate both read and write performance will be presented. Limitations of the traditional 2D structure and the recent transition to 3D structures will be discussed as a key breakthrough for future NAND flash memory devices.”