Abstract
This publication describes systems and techniques to implement a stochastic-based wear leveling scheme for block erasures to extend the usable life of flash memory and other types of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM). Some existing approaches for wear leveling are resource intensive and may be merged with a file system that also attempts to distribute write operations, which impacts both the write distribution and the erasure wear leveling. In contrast, described systems and techniques can be implemented separately from file system routines, including at the hardware level. Initially, a block of a memory is identified for erasure. The erasure age of the identified block is compared to a first threshold, which is based on an average age of the blocks across the memory. A targeted block is determined using a random process. The erasure age of the targeted block is compared to a second threshold, which is based on the erasure age of the identified block. If both comparisons are positive, the data of the targeted block is moved to the identified block to promote wear leveling, the targeted block is erased, and a mapping table is updated to reflect the block-address swap. If not, block-address swapping is skipped for this erasure operation. In these manners, the described wear leveling scheme can be implemented efficiently and can approach optimum wear leveling performance.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Phoenix, Chris, "High-Performance Low-Overhead Stochastic Wear Leveling of Flash Memory By Comparing Age of a Block with Age of a Randomly Selected Block", Technical Disclosure Commons, (July 20, 2020)
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/3437