Abstract:
Solid state drives which use flash memories for storage are being rapidly deployed for both consumer and enterprise applications due to their faster speeds and lower power consumption. However, with the industry’s pursuit to drive down cost by shrinking the memory cell sizes and increasing storage densities, the endurance of the device is severely affected. As a result, the error-correction code (ECC) component of the flash controller chip plays a greater role in ensuring that the desired endurance of the SSD is met. While the industry has recognized the need for transitioning to the use of low-density parity-check (LDPC)-based ECC to obtain greater endurance, current state-of-the-art LDPC solutions still have issues in terms of speed, performance, and power, which are all critical to address in order to enable low-cost high-performance SSDs. Codelucida is developing novel LDPC technology that provides greater reliability and speeds along with a smaller footprint than state-of-the-art. The key differentiator is in the proprietary underlying decoding algorithm that utilizes very simple hardware architectures leading to a smaller footprint while still providing greater reliabilities than current solutions.