A Low-Complexity High-Performance Wear-Leveling Algorithm for Flash Memory System Design

Abstract — In this paper, a low-complexity high-performance wear-leveling algorithm which named sequential garbage collection (SGC) for flash memory system design is presented. The proposed SGC outperforms existing designs in terms of wear evenness and low design complexity. The lifetime of the entire flash memory can be greatly lengthened by the proposed SGC. In addition, the proposed SGC doesn’t require any tuning threshold parameter, and thus it can be applied to various systems without prior knowledge of the system environment for threshold tuning. The low-complexity low-cost SGC makes it is easy to be implemented by firmware-based or hardware-based approaches. The simulation results show that the maximum block erase count and the standard deviation of the block erase count are decreased by up to 75 % and 94%, respectively, as compared to the greedy algorithm. I