A Versatile Emulator for the Aging Effect of Non-volatile Memories: The Case of NAND Flash

This work presents a versatile and flexible FPGA-based platform, designed for accurate emulation of the aging effect of non-volatile memories. The emulator is based on a reconfigurable hardware-software architecture which enables the accurate representation of various non-volatile memory technologies, like NAND Flash and PCM. The proposed architecture can be used for emulating memories at the cell, chip and system level, while the proposed hardware platform can be used as a valuable tool for the development and evaluation of memory-related algorithms and techniques. In this paper, we analyze the architecture of the non-volatile memory emulator, focusing mainly on the NAND Flash case, we present details about its internal functionality and, using experimental results, we demonstrate the high accuracy achieved when it is used to emulate a specific NAND Flash chip.