Virtual Flash Chips: Reinforcing the Hardware Abstraction Layer to Improve Data Recoverability of Flash Devices

The market trend of flash memory chips has been toward high density but with low reliability. The rapidly increasing bit error rates and emerging reliability issues of the coming triple-level cell and even three-dimensional flash chips will expose users to extremely high risks for storing data in such low reliability storage media. With these concerns in mind, this paper rethinks the layer design of flash devices and proposes a complete paradigm shift to re-configure physical flash chips of potentially massive parallelism into better “virtual chips”, in order to improve the data recoverability in a modular and low-cost way. The concept of virtual chips is realized by reinforcing the hardware abstraction layer without continually complicating the conventional flash management software of the flash translation layer. The capability and compatibility of the proposed design were verified by both property analysis and a series of experiments with encouraging results.