Tutorial: Why NAND Flash Breaks Down

Tutorial: Why NAND Flash Breaks Down - Arnout Vandecappelle, Essensium/Mind

Most embedded systems developers are aware that NAND flash isn't entirely reliable, and have heard of erase cycles, read disturb, retention time, paired pages, ECC, wear levelling etc. However, few understand why things go wrong. This talk will correct that. We start by looking at how a flash cell operates. This will give us an understanding of why the wrong bit may be read from it. Then we can look at how the faults can be mitigated. Finally we can think about how all this will evolve in the future.

About Arnott Vandecappelle

Arnout Vandecappelle is working since 2008 as Senior Embedded Software Architect at Essensium/Mind, providing consultancy on Linux and Open Source Software for Embedded Systems: driver development, debugging, system integration, etc. He has contributed to several open source projects, including buildroot and GStreamer. Previously he has been working for 10 years at IMEC where he held several different positions in research and software development in the field of memory-aware compile technology.