Jeong Ki Kim , Sung Min Park , Chae Kyu Kim

The KIPS Transactions:PartA, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 399-404, Dec. 2002
10.3745/KIPSTA.2002.9.4.399,   PDF Download:

Abstract

Along the evolution of information and communication technologies, manufacturing embedded systems such as PDA (personal digital assistant), HPC (hand-held PC), settop box, and information appliance became realistic. And RTOS (real-time operating system) and filesystem have been played essential roles within the embedded systems as well. For the filesystem of embedded systems, flash memory has been used extensively instead of traditional hard disk drives because of embedded system''s requirements like portability, fast access time, and low power consumption. Other than these requirements, nonvolatile storage characteristic of flash memory is another reason for wide adoption in industry. However, there are some technical challenges to cope with to use the flash memory as an indispensable component of the embedded systems. These would be relatively slow cleaning time and the limited number of times to write-and-clean. In this paper, a new cleaning policy is proposed to overcome the problems mentioned above and relevant performance comparison results will be provided. Ranking cleaning policy (RCP) decides when and where to clean within the flash memory considering the cost of cleaning and the number of times of cleaning. This method will maximize not only the lifetime of flash memory but also the performance of access time and manageability. As a result of performance comparison, RCP has showed about 10~50% of performance evolution compared to traditional policies, Greedy and Cost-benefit methods, by write throughputs.

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