Design Optimization Techniques for the SSD Controller

Flash memory is becoming widely prevalent in various area due to high performance, non-volatile features, low power, and robust durability. As price-per-bit is decreased, NAND flash based SSDs (Solid State Disk) have been attracting attention as the next generation storage device, which can replace HDDs (Hard Disk Drive) which have mechanical properties. Especially for the single package SSD, if channel number or FIFO buffer size per channel increases to improve performance, the size of a controller and I/O pin count will increase linearly with channel numbers and form factor will be affected. We propose a novel technique which can minimize form factor by optimizing the number of NAND flash channels and the size of interface FIFO buffer in the SSD. For SSD with 10 channel and double buffer, the experimental results show that buffer block size can be reduced about 73% without performance degradation and total size of a controller can be reduced about 40% because control block per channel and I/O pin count decrease according to decrease channel number.