History of Nand Flash Technology

As flash memory technologies quickly improve, NAND flash memory is becoming an attractive
storage solution for various IT applications from mobile consumer electronics to high-end server
systems. This rapid growth is largely driven by the desirable characteristics of NAND flash
memory, which include high performance and low-power consumption.

There are two types of NAND flash memory in the market: a single-level cell (SLC) and a multi-
level cell (MLC) flash memory. They are distinctive in terms of capacity, performance, and
endurance. The capacity of MLC flash memory is larger than that of SLC flash memory. By
storing two (or more) bits on a single memory cell, MLC flash memory achieves significant
density increases while lowering the cost per bit over SLC flash memory which can only store a
single bit on a cell. However, SLC flash memory has a higher performance and a longer cell
endurance over MLC flash memory. Especially, the write performance of SLC flash memory is
much higher than that of MLC flash memory.

NAND flash memory consists of multiple blocks, each of which is composed of several pages. In
many NAND flash memories, the size of a page is between 512 B and 4 KB, and one block
consists of between 4 and 128 pages. NAND flash memory does not support an overwrite
operation because of its write-once nature. Therefore, before writing new data into a block, the
previous data must be erased. Furthermore, the total number of erasures allowed for each block
is typically limited to between 10,000 and 100,000 cycles.

SLC and MLC working structure

In the Single Level Cell (SLC) method, a memory cell stores 1 bit, 0 or 1. On the other hand,
cells in Multi-Level Cell record 4 states in 2 bits (i.e. 00, 01, 10 and 11), which means it takes
longer to differentiate each state and is less stable compared to SLC due to issues including
information interference. But MLC does have an advantage in that it can double memory space.

Features of SLC

 Faster than MLC

 More reliable
 Less risk of losing data when power abruptly goes out
 Longer life (Lasts more than 100,000 program erase cycles apposed to 1,000/3,000 for
MLC)
Features of MLC

 Able to achieve higher capacities

 Geometry is constantly reduced meaning sales life cycle is short but is on the forefront of
technology releases.
 Price is approximately 1/6 of SLC
 Extended temperatures options can be difficult to source and are only offered from a few
select manufacturers.

To sum this up it is all down to the amount of Program Erase Cycles (P/E) you can write to each
type of flash which intern equals more endurance.

 Consumer TLC = 500 P/E or below

 Consumer MLC = 1000 P/E or below
 Industrial MLC = 3k P/E
 Industrial SLC = 100k P/E

Performance comparison of different types of cell programming (us)

Design Overview

Basics of NAND Flash Memory

Layer wise design

Coding and design as following as

 Outputs will share shortly