HardwareSemiconductors

Understanding & Designing Modern Storage Systems - M9: Flash Memory & Solid-State Drives

Onur Mutlu Lectures
Onur Mutlu Lectures•May 29, 2026

Why It Matters

Understanding these operational details explains SSD performance, endurance, and design trade-offs that drive controller, firmware and system-level strategies for reliability and capacity. These device constraints have shaped the modern storage industry and ongoing innovation in 3D flash and memory architectures.

Summary

The lecture explains how flash memory and SSDs work at a device and array level, emphasizing NAND flash’s block-erase, page-program, and page-read granularity. It describes floating-gate transistors that store data as threshold voltages, the need for read reference and pass-through voltages because cells are wired in NAND strings, and incremental step-pulse programming to set precise charge levels. The talk highlights density advantages of transistor-only flash, differences from DRAM operation, and hints at practical limitations such as charge drift and erase costs. It also contrasts planar (2D) flash with upcoming 3D designs.

Original Description

Project and Seminars Course: Understanding and Designing Modern Storage Systems, ETH Zürich, Spring 2026
Lecture 9: Flash Memory & Solid-State Drives
Lecturer: Prof. Onur Mutlu
Date: May 29, 2026
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