A compact on-chip ECC for low cost flash memories

A compact on-chip error correcting circuit (ECC) for low cost Flash memories has been developed,The total increase in chip area is 2%, including all cells, sense amplifiers, logic, and wiring associated with the ECC, The proposed on-chip ECC, employing 10 check bits for 512 data bits, has been implemented on an experimental 64M-bit NAND Flash memory, The cumulative sector error rate has been improved from 10(-1) to 10(-10). By transferring read data from the sense amplifiers to the ECC twice, 522-Byte temporary buffers, which are required for the conventional ECC and occupy a large part of the ECC area, have been eliminated, As a result, the area for the circuit has been drastically reduced by a factor of 25, The proposed on-chip ECC has been optimized in consideration of balance between the reliability improvement and the cell area overhead, The power increase has been suppressed to less than 1 mA.