Background

Wide variety of electronic systems uses NAND flash memory for data storage. NAND Flash memory is a form of non-volatile memory (NVM) that can be electrically programmed and erased..
In NAND flash, The Floating Gate cells (FG) are connected in series, resembling a NAND gate. As NAND Flash memory process technology scales, the coupling between neighboring cells increases. As a result, programming one FG cell causes Voltage Threshold (Vt) change of neighboring cells, according to the level of coupling. This also known as the Inter-Cell Coupling Effect.
Consequently, writing data may induce errors, Vt distributions are boarding, the memory has less storage capacity, and writing and reading from a memory cell become increasingly difficult.

Method

Our novel method reduces the FG inter-cell coupling effect by constraining data encoding, to forbid certain types of data sequences which increase Vt distributions in neighboring cells. As a result, Vt distributions width is decreased, increasing reliability and more data levels become available to use.
Thereupon, the NAND flash memory capacity is enlarged whereas the amount of cell's reading and writing errors is minimized.
Moreover, implementing our innovative scheme require small degree of data redundancy whereas combinations with various programming techniques are possible.

Advantages
• Enlarging data storage at flash memories
• Fast writing and reading
• Better Memory reliability

Applications

• All Electronic devices based with non-volatile memory for data storage