RiF: Improving Read Performance of Modern SSDs Using an On-Die Early-Retry Engine

Modern high-performance SSDs have multiple flash channels operating in parallel to achieve their high I/O bandwidth. However, when the effective bandwidth of these flash channels declines, the SSD's overall bandwidth is substantially impacted. In contemporary SSDs featuring high-density 3D NAND flash memory, frequent invocations of a read-retry procedure pose a significant challenge to fully utilizing the maximum I/O bandwidth of a flash channel. In this paper, we propose a novel read-retry optimization scheme, Retry-in-Flash (RiF), which proactively minimizes the amount of time wasted in conventional read-retry procedures. Unlike existing read-retry solutions that focus on identifying an optimal read-reference voltage for a sensed page, the RiF scheme focuses on determining early on whether a read-retry will be required for the sensed data. To know if a read-retry is needed or not at the earliest possible time, we propose a RiF-enabled flash chip with an on-die early-retry (ODEAR) engine. When the ODEAR engine determines that a sensed page requires a read-retry, a readreference voltage is immediately adjusted and the same page is re-read while ignoring the previously sensed page. By performing the key steps of a read-retry procedure inside a RiF flash chip without transferring the sensed uncorrectable page to an offchip controller, the RiF scheme prevents the read bandwidth of a flash channel from being wasted due to failed read data. To evaluate the RiF scheme, we developed a prototype RiF-enabled flash chip and constructed a RiF-aware SSD simulator using RiF flash chips. Our evaluation results show that the proposed RiF scheme improves the effective SSD bandwidth by 72.1% on average over a state-of-the-art read-retry solution at 2K P/E cycles with negligible power and area overheads.