Exploiting Heat-Accelerated Flash Memory Wear-Out Recovery to Enable Self-Healing SSDs

This paper proposes a self-healing solid-state drive (SSD) design strategy that exploits heat-accelerated recovery of NAND flash memory cell wear-out to improve SSD lifetime. The key is to make each NAND flash memory chip self-healable by stacking an extra heater die, and to employ system-level redundancy to ensure SSD data storage integrity when one memory chip is being self-heated for memory cell wear-out recovery. Based upon detailed thermal modeling and memory cell device modeling, we carried out simulations and performed detailed analysis. The results show that SSD lifetime can be improved by over five times at reasonable performance and energy consumption overhead.