Abstract
NAND flash memory has advantages of non-volatility, little power consumption and fast access time. However, it suffers from inability that does not provide to update-in-place and the erase cycle is limited. Moreover, the unit of read/write operation is a page and the unit of erase operation is a block. Therefore, erase operation is slower than other operations. The AGC, the proposed garbage collection policy focuses on not only garbage collection time reduction for real-time guarantee but also wear-leveling for a flash memory lifetime. In order to achieve above goals, we define three garbage collection operating modes: Fast Mode, Smart Mode, and Wear-leveling Mode. The proposed policy decides the garbage collection mode depending on system CPU usage rate. Fast Mode selects the dirtiest block as victim block to minimize the erase operation time. However, Smart Mode selects the victim block by reflecting the invalid page number and block erase count to minimizing the erase operation time and deviation of block erase count. Wear-leveling Mode operates similar to Smart Mode and it makes groups and relocates the pages which has the similar update time. We implemented the proposed policy and measured the performance compare with the existing policies. Simulation results show that the proposed policy performs better than Cost-benefit policy with the 55% reduction in the operation time. Also, it performs better than Greedy policy with the 87% reduction in the deviation of erase count. Most of all, the proposed policy works adaptively according to the CPU usage rate, and guarantees the real-time performance of the system.