A flash compression layer for SmartMedia card systems

Keun Soo Yim, Hyokyung Bahn, Kern Koh

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

53 Scopus citations

Abstract

Flash memory based SmartMedia Card is becoming increasingly popular as data storage for mobile consumer electronics. Since flash memory is an order of magnitude more expensive than magnetic disks, data compression can be effectively used in managing flash memory based storage systems. However, compressed data management in flash memory is challenging because it only supports page-based I/Os. For example, when the size of compressed data is smaller than the page size, internal fragmentation occurs and this degrades the effectiveness of compression seriously. In this paper, we developed a flash compression layer (FCL) for the SmartMedia Card systems. FCL stores several small compressed pages into one physical page by using a write buffer. Based on prototype implementation and simulation studies, we show that the proposed system offers the storage of flash memory more than 140% of its original size and expands the write bandwidth significantly.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)192-197
Number of pages6
JournalIEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics
Volume50
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 2004

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
1This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Information and Communication under the Fundamental Technology Research program and the Ministry of Education under the BK21 program in Korea.

Keywords

  • Data compression
  • Flash memory
  • NAND-type flash memory
  • SmartMedia Card
  • Storage expansion

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