A scaling scenario of asymmetric coding to reduce both data retention and program disturbance of NAND flash memories

•We analyze the effect of asymmetric coding in 2× to 4×nm NAND flash memories.•Proposed asymmetric coding strategy increases the population of the lowest VTH state.•Program-disturb BER with proposed strategy in 4×nm NAND is reduced by 89%.•Data-retention BER with proposed strategy in 4×nm NAND flash memory reduces by 70%.

An optimized asymmetric coding strategy is proposed to improve the reliability of the NAND flash memories. The previously reported asymmetric coding reduces the data-retention error by decreasing the population of the VTH state which has higher error rate, and is measured on 4×nm NAND flash memory [1]. In [2], by increasing the number of the lowest VTH state, the proposed asymmetric coding strategy reduces the VPGM disturbance, and alleviates the floating-gate (FG)-FG coupling. And also, the program-disturb bit error rates (BERs) in 2×nm, 3×nm, and 4×nm NAND flash memories are reduced by 71%, 73%, and 89%, respectively. In this paper, the effect of asymmetric coding on the data-retention error is investigated in 2×nm NAND flash memory. From the measured results, the proposed asymmetric coding effectively increases the population of the lowest VTH state which has no data-retention error. The data-retention BERs in 2×nm, 3×nm and 4×nm NAND are decreased by 17%, 52% and 70%, respectively.