Memory Controller Wear-Leveling via Zone Block Data Swapping
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Solution Overview
Problem
Nonvolatile memory devices experience uneven wear across different memory areas, leading to shortened device lifetime due to varying usage frequencies, which existing memory controllers fail to effectively manage.
Innovation Solution
A memory controller with multiple control cores and a wear-leveling controller that swaps data between zone blocks based on wear levels, ensuring even usage across all areas by grouping zone blocks and performing global wear-leveling operations.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Quantity of substance
If data is stored in nonvolatile memory areas with varying usage frequencies, then storage capacity is utilized efficiently, but wear levels become uneven leading to shortened device lifetime
Solution Approach 1:
The memory device is divided into multiple zone blocks, each managed by a separate control core. This segmentation allows independent monitoring and management of wear levels in different memory areas, enabling targeted wear-leveling operations that redistribute data to balance wear across all zone blocks while maintaining efficient storage capacity utilization.
Solution Approach 2:
The system continuously monitors wear levels in each zone block through control cores that track usage frequency. This feedback mechanism enables the wear-leveling controller to detect uneven wear patterns and initiate data swapping operations between zone blocks with different wear levels, thereby extending device lifetime while preserving storage efficiency.
2Productivity
If multiple control cores manage different zone blocks, then data access performance is improved through parallel control, but wear-leveling complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
Each control core is assigned specific zone blocks to manage, creating a segmented control architecture that enables parallel data access operations across multiple memory areas. This segmentation maintains high data access performance through concurrent operations while the wear-leveling controller coordinates swapping operations between zones managed by different control cores.
Solution Approach 2:
The wear-leveling controller acts as an intermediary that coordinates between multiple control cores, receiving wear level information from each control core and orchestrating data swapping operations. This intermediary role simplifies the overall system architecture by centralizing wear-leveling decisions while allowing control cores to maintain their parallel data access functions.
3Reliability
If zone blocks with different control cores are grouped together for wear-leveling, then wear distribution is improved, but data access latency may increase due to cross-core data movement
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments zone blocks into groups that can be managed by different control cores, allowing wear-leveling operations to target specific zones while maintaining parallel data access paths. This segmentation enables wear distribution improvement without forcing all data to be accessed through a single control core, thereby limiting latency impact.
Solution Approach 2:
The wear-leveling operation performs partial data swapping between zone blocks rather than complete redistribution. This partial action approach achieves sufficient wear distribution to extend device lifetime while minimizing the time required for data movement, thereby reducing latency impact on normal data access operations.
Data Source
AI summary
Provided herein may be a memory controller and a memory system including the same. The memory controller may include a plurality of control cores configured to control a plurality of zone blocks respectively corresponding to logical address groups provided by a host, a buffer memory configured to store information about a zone group including zone blocks which are controlled by different control cores among the plurality of zone blocks, the information about zone group being generated based on information about an available space in each of the plurality of zone blocks, and a wear-leveling controller configured to control the plurality of control cores to perform a global wear-leveling operation of swapping pieces of data between the zone blocks included in the zone group based on a wear-level of the plurality of zone blocks.