摘要
This paper proposes a progressive error-aware ECC (PEA-ECC) technique that incorporates multiple ECC protection levels for flash memory. We determine whether to upgrade the protection levels of flash memory pages by analyzing the correction slack of codewords during decoding. Furthermore, we separate the decoding process into two phases: error detection and error correction. Error correction is performed only if the codeword actually contains errors, which reduces decoding latency for error-free codewords. Additionally, we employ a reconfigurable BCH codec capable of encoding and decoding multiple BCH protection levels. The corresponding hardware architecture of PEA-ECC is also presented. We analyze the reliability, performance, and hardware overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique reduces decoding latency by up to 87.5% while maintaining a reliability of 0.998 after extended operation hours. The incurred hardware overhead is also negligible.