A First Study on Self-Healing Solid-State Drives

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