Soft-Decision Error Correction of NAND Flash Memory with a Turbo Product Code

As NAND flash memory fabrication technology scales down to 20 nm and below, the raw bit error rate increases very rapidly and conventional hard-decision based error correction does not provide enough protection. The turbo product code (TPC) based error correction with multi-precision output from NAND flash memory is promising because of high error-correcting performance and flexibility in code construction. In this work, we construct a rate-0.907 (36116, 32768) extended TPC for 2-bit MLC NAND flash memory, and apply the Chase–Pyndiah decoding algorithm. An efficient complexity reduction scheme is also proposed to eliminate redundant computations in the Chase–Pyndiah decoding algorithm. The replica parallel decoding is also employed to lower the error floor. The experimental results that include the effects of flash memory output precision are presented for a simulated flash memory channel.