NAND Flash Products

Various effects like data retention, read disturb limits, or temperature can impact data reliability. The latest generation of Swissbit products use special methods to maintain and refresh the data for higher data integrity.

The Swissbit Life Time Monitoring feature enables users to access the memory device’s detailed Life Time Status and allows prediction of imminent failure, avoiding unexpected data loss. This feature uses an extended S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) interface or vendor-specific commands to retrieve the Flash product information.

Intelligent Power Fail Protection and Recovery protects data from unexpected power loss. During an unintentional shutdown, firmware routines and an intelligent hardware architecture ensure that all system and user data will be stored to the NAND.

Products with the Swissbit powersafe feature use reliable tantalum capacitors to store energy so that in case of a sudden power fail the charge will be used to harden the cache content into the NAND flash.

In many industrial applications the data is written to the NAND Flash once and is only read afterwards. For such cases, the firmware can be optimized in order to guarantee the highest possible data retention and less read disturb.

This feature uses an uninterruptable sequence of data erase commands. Even a power off can’t stop the process, which will continue upon restoration of power. The optional enhanced feature allows the customer to sanitize the data according to different standards like DoD, NSA, IREC, etc. The purge algorithm can be started by a software command or through a hardware pin.

Robustness is one of our key specification targets. The design, assembly and use of selected materials guarantee an extremely solid design which has been validated by extensive testing.

The sensor allows the host hardware or software to monitor the memory device temperature to improve data reliability in the target application environment.

The TRIM command allows the operating system to inform the SSD which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped out internally, which increases system performance in following write accesses. With TRIM Support data scrap can be deleted in advance, which otherwise would slow down future write operations to the involved blocks.

The WAF (write amplification factor) for MLC-based products is reduced by combining a paged based FW block management with a powerful card architecture and configuration settings.

Sophisticated Wear Leveling and Bad Block Management ensure that Flash cells are sparingly and equally used in order to prolong life time of the device.

Swissbit‘s embedded memory and storage solutions are designed and approved for reliable operation over a wide temperature range. The products are verified at temperature corners and prestressed with a burn-in operating functional test (Test During Burn In – TDBI).