In M-bit/cell multi-level cell (MLC) flash memories, it is more difficult to guarantee the reliability of data as M increases. The reason is that an M-bit/cell MLC has 2 M states whereas a single-level cell (SLC) has only two states. Hence, compared to SLC, the margin of MLC is reduced, thereby making it sensitive to a number of degradation mechanisms such as cell-to-cell interference and charge leakage. In flash memories, distances between 2 M states can be controlled by adjusting verify levels during incremental step pulse programming (ISPP). For high data reliability, the control of verify levels in ISPP is important because the bit error rate (BER) will be affected significantly by verify levels. As M increases, the verify level control will be more important and complex. In this article, we investigate two verify level control criteria for MLC flash memories. The first criterion is to minimize the overall BER and the second criterion is to make page BERs equal. The choice between these criteria relates to flash memory architecture, bits per cell, reliability, and speed performance. Considering these factors, we will discuss the strategy of verify level control in the hybrid solid state drives (SSD) which are composed of flash memories with different number of bits per cell.
We propose an area-efficient high-speed interleaved Viterbi decoder architecture, which is based on the state-parallel architecture with register exchange path memory structure, for interleaved convolutional code. The state-parallel architecture uses as many add-compare-select (ACS) units as the number of trellis states. By replacing each delay (or storage) element in state metrics memory (or path metrics memory) and path memory (or survival memory) with delays, interleaved Viterbi decoder is obtained where is the interleaving degree. The decoding speed of this decoder architecture is as fast as the operating clock speed. The latency of proposed interleaved Viterbi decoder is decoding depth (DD) interleaving degree , which increases linearly with the interleaving degree .
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