Post-manufacturing, 17-times acceptable raw bit error rate enhancement, dynamic codeword transition ECC scheme for highly reliable solid-state drives, SSDs

A dynamic codeword transition ECC scheme is proposed for highly reliable solid-state drives, SSDs. By monitoring the error number or the write / erase cycles, the ECC codeword dynamically increases from 512Byte (+parity) to 1KByte, 2KByte, 4KByte...32KByte. The proposed ECC with a larger codeword decreases the failure rate after ECC. As a result, the acceptable raw bit error rate, BER, before ECC is enhanced. Assuming a NAND Flash memory which requires 8-bit correction in 512Byte codeword ECC, a 17-times higher acceptable raw BER than the conventional fixed 512Byte codeword ECC is realized for the mobile phone application without an interleaving. For the MP3 player, digital-still camera and high-speed memory card applications with a dual channel interleaving, 15-times higher acceptable raw BER is achieved. Finally, for the SSD application with 8 channel interleaving, 13-times higher acceptable raw BER is realized. Because the parity rate per codeword is the same in each ECC codeword, no additional memory area is required. Note that the reliability of SSD is improved after the manufacturing without cost penalty. Compared with the conventional ECC with the fixed large 32KByte codeword, the proposed scheme achieves a better performance and a lower power consumption by introducing the “best-effort” type operation. In the proposed scheme, during the most of the lifetime of SSD, a weak ECC with a shorter codeword such as 512Byte (+parity), 1KByte and 2KByte is used and a 2.6 times better performance and a 98% lower power consumption is realized. At the life-end of SSD, a strong ECC with a 32KByte codeword is used and the highly reliable operation is achieved.