Retention trimming for wear reduction of flash memory storage systems

NAND flash memory has been widely applied in embedded systems, personal computer systems, and data centers. However, with the development of flash memory, including its technology scaling and density improvement, the endurance of flash memory becomes a bottleneck. In this work, with the understanding of the relationship between data retention time and flash wearing, a retention trimming approach, which trims data retention time based on the time intervals between data updating, is proposed to reduce the wearing of flash memory. Reduced wearing of flash memory will improve the endurance of the flash memory. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves significant wearing reduction for flash memory through retention trimming.