Chameleon: A High Performance Flash/FRAM Hybrid Solid State Disk Architecture

—Flash memory solid state disk (SSD) is gaining popularity and replacing hard disk drive (HDD) in mobile computing systems such as ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs) and notebook PCs because of lower power consumption, faster random access, and higher shock resistance. One of the key challenges in designing a high-performance flash memory SSD is an efficient handling of small random writes to non-volatile data whose performance suffers from the inherent limitation of flash memory that prohibits in-place update. In this paper, we propose a high performance Flash/FRAM hybrid SSD architecture called Chameleon. In Chameleon, metadata used by the flash translation layer (FTL), a software layer in the flash memory SSD, is maintained in a small FRAM since this metadata is a target of intensive small random writes, whereas the bulk data is kept in the flash memory. Performance evaluation based on an FPGA implementation of the Chameleon architecture shows that the use

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: CAL
• Authors: Jinhyuk Yoon, Eyee Hyun Nam, Yoon Jae Seong, Hongseok Kim, B. S. Kim, Sang Lyul Min, Yookun Cho
• Keywords: CAL 2007, CAL 2008, Flash Memory, Flash Memory Ssd, Small Random