NAND flash service lifetime estimate with recovery effect and retention time relaxation

A service life model of NAND flash and threshold voltage shift process is proposed to calculate the service life and endurance. The relationships among achievable program/erase (P/E) cycles, recovery time, bad block rate and storage time are analyzed. The achievable endurance and service life of a NAND flash are evaluated based on a flash cell degradation and recovery model by varying recovery time, badblock rate, and storage time. It is proposed to improve the service lifetime of solid state disk by both relaxing the bad block rate limitation and retention time while extending the recovery time. The results indicate that endurance can be improved by 17 times if the storage time guarantee is reduced from 10 a to 1 a with 105 s recovery time inserted between cycles. © 2014 Central South University Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.