3-D NAND Flash Value-Aware SSD: Error-Tolerant SSD Without ECCs for Image Recognition

This paper proposes Value-Aware solid-state drive (SSD) with fast access speed and low power consumption by eliminating error-correcting code (ECC). Value-Aware SSD utilizes the error tolerance of image recognition application using a deep neural network (DNN) to enhance reliability. In a previous paper, which proposes Value-Aware SSD, fast ECC decoder is implemented and SSD is evaluated with the 32-bit floating-point data format. On the other hand, in this paper, the proposed Value-Aware SSD is analyzed with 32-bit and 8-bit fixed-point data format and achieves the higher reliability even without ECC by newly proposed two techniques, Critical Bit Error Reduction (CBER) and Middle & Lower Page Error Reduction (M&L-PER). CBER and M&L-PER are proposed for 32-bit and 8-bit data format of application, respectively. These techniques modulate the threshold voltage ( $V_{\mathrm {TH}}$ ) distribution of memory cells by recognizing the importance of each stored bit. By proposed CBER, as much as 15% bit error rate (BER) of NAND flash is allowed while the application provides high image recognition accuracy. Even if bit precision is truncated to 8 bit, 3.9% BER is accepted by M&L-PER. The fast read access and low power consumption are realized because ECC is not required. Finally, this paper analyzes the Value-Aware techniques with 3-D multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash to compare the effects for 3D-MLC and triple-level cell (TLC) NAND flash.