Sentinel Cells Enabled Fast Read for NAND Flash

With latest development, NAND flash is experiencing increased errors. The read reference voltages are the key factor for RBER seen by ECC. The limited error correction capability of ECC determines a value range that the read voltages should fall into, otherwise a read failure followed by a read retry with tuned read voltage, would happen. Therefore, finding a correct read voltage with the smallest number of read failures has been a hot research problem. Previous methods in the literature are designed to either progressively tune the voltage value or empirically predict a read voltage based on error models. However, straightforward tuning leads to unpredictable large number of read retries, whereas complex modeling brings large overhead. This paper proposes a novel approach, by reserving a small set of cells as sentinels, which directly tell us the optimal voltage, as drifting caused errors exhibits strong locality. Experiments demonstrate the proposed technique is both efficient and effective.