Memory Device Wear Leveling Repair With ECC Scrubbing
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing memory devices face issues with data corruption during wear leveling operations due to uncorrectable errors in memory pages, which can lead to widespread data corruption and difficulty in tracking physical failures, especially under malicious attacks.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a wear leveling repair mechanism that performs an ECC scrub before data transfer and initiates a wear leveling soft repair (WLSR) for pages with uncorrectable errors, diverting future operations away from these pages to maintain data integrity and enhance security.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Duration of action of stationary object
If wear leveling operations are performed to distribute write operations evenly across memory pages, then memory device longevity is improved, but data corruption risk increases due to uncorrectable errors in corrupted pages
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs an ECC scrub operation before the wear leveling data transfer to detect and correct potential errors in advance. This preliminary error detection prevents corrupted data from being transferred during wear leveling, thereby maintaining data integrity while still enabling the wear leveling operation to extend memory device longevity.
Solution Approach 2:
The ECC (Error Correction Code) mechanism acts as an intermediary between the wear leveling operation and the data storage. By inserting the ECC scrub step as an intermediate check, the system can identify and correct errors before they propagate, thus protecting data integrity without preventing the wear leveling process from occurring.
2Productivity
If data is transferred during wear leveling operations, then wear leveling effectiveness is improved, but data corruption spreads to additional pages
Solution Approach 1:
The ECC scrub is performed as a preliminary action before the wear leveling data transfer. This提前检查 identifies corrupted pages that should not be transferred, allowing the wear leveling operation to skip these pages and only transfer clean data, thus preventing corruption spread while maintaining wear leveling effectiveness.
Solution Approach 2:
The presence of corrupted pages, which would normally cause data loss during wear leveling, is converted into a benefit by using the ECC scrub to identify them. The error detection capability transforms the potential harm of corrupted pages into useful information that guides the wear leveling process to avoid transferring bad data, thereby preventing corruption spread.
3Device complexity
If traditional error correction is used without wear leveling repair, then device complexity is reduced, but security vulnerability increases against malicious attacks
Solution Approach 1:
The wear leveling repair mechanism performs a preliminary ECC scrub before data transfer to detect corrupted pages. This additional preliminary check layer enhances security by identifying potential attack vectors or corruption before they can compromise data integrity, without significantly increasing overall device complexity since it builds upon existing ECC capabilities.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback by monitoring ECC scrub results and using this information to guide the wear leveling operation. When corrupted pages are detected, the feedback mechanism prevents their transfer and triggers appropriate repair actions. This feedback loop enhances security by continuously monitoring and responding to potential threats while maintaining relatively simple device architecture.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems, methods, and apparatuses are provided for wear leveling repair in a memory device. A host is configured to issue a wear leveling command and a repair request to a memory device configured to check source data in a memory of the memory device for errors in response to receiving the wear leveling command from the host, transfer source data in the memory of the memory device to a target page, and repair a source page if the source data includes an error. The memory device is further configured to set a new repair match if a wear leveling repair element was not consumed after receiving the repair request and flush a previous repair match before setting the new repair match if the wear leveling repair element was consumed and a physical address of an incoming repair request is associated with the wear leveling repair element.