eMMCs: An Introduction

NAND Flash is, without a doubt, the cheapest way to store a ton of bits in one place. It's also one of the most aggravating memory mediums to work with. Bits wear out, errors pop up, and data gets lost. Why deal with all the hassle of managing your memory manually? Instead, use an eMMC!

The Trouble With NAND Flash

NAND Flash has a number of inherent issues associated with data retention and accuracy. Failures due to semiconductor variation can lead to data loss at any time. What's worse, these issues are only exacerbated by time and continued use of the chip. These issues can generally be kept at bay with a some simple software techinques. Error correction codes, wear leveling algorithms, and bad block management can all extend the lifetime of a NAND chip by utilizing chip space intelligently. However, this comes at a cost: silicon process sizes continue to shrink following Moore's law, meaning floating gates within the chips start becoming more vulnerable to errors. Compounding this problem is the rise of multi-level cell (MLC) and triple-level cell (TLC) NAND, which encode multiple bit values in a single floating gate transistor! This generally means that a more robust ECC algorithm is necessary to show data correctness, but that comes at the cost of greater ECC bit overhead and increased computation times for complex ECC algorithms.

(Note: I've written previously about how NAND can break and how to prevent it from breaking in my own blog. Check it out if you'd like to know more about NAND failure modes!)

All this complexity (and the software written to manage it) begs the question - isn't there a better way? As it so happens, there is!

Pick a Card, Any Card

Embedded MultiMediaCards (eMMCs for short) grew out of the now-obsolete MultiMediaCard standard. Though MMCs were later replaced by SD cards, the two technologies shared one common architectural feature: instead of exposing raw NAND Flash to the host machine, the cards contained a small controller IC that took care of processor interfaces and chip management. The NAND management feature is a big deal - instead of requiring the processor to do all the work of showing that nonvolatile data is good, a system processor is freed to do other tasks! Popular but complex software workarounds, like journaling Flash filesystems, were rendered reasonably obsolete by this development. Keep in mind, however, that these cards are not a cure-all. They depend on Flash memory, and thus have finite lifetimes. To help predict the health of the internal data, most NAND vendors will expose registers to the host showing worst-case program/erase cycles of internal blocks, as well as total P/E cycles for the device.

Speed Freaks

The NAND management controller within eMMCs has another benefit over raw NAND Flash: speed. The ONFI Consoritum quotes speeds of up to 150 MB/s in ONFI 2.0 devices; however, this is generally not achievable in practice due to latency in address turnarounds between a processor controller and the NAND device. The quoted maximum of most NAND is the baseline for an average eMMC.

How do they achieve these gains? eMMCs improve this drastically by adopting a pipeline architecture similar to DDR DRAM - sequential reads generally don't require additional addressing to access following sections of memory. This is due to the availability of a cache on eMMCs that raw NAND lacks. This onboard processor and its cache memory allows the host processor to effectively stage data in the controller for reading or writing into NAND cells without having to worry about seeing those actions to completion. Thetradeoff, like raw NAND Flash, is a hit on random read performance. Since a new location to be read requires a staging of a page of NAND data in the controller, it is subject to the same latency that raw NAND devices are.

A Faster Way

eMMCs offer a competitive way of delivering robust, high performance products to the market in less time than raw NAND solutions. They hit a real sweet spot in terms of cost, complexity, and availability over raw NAND.

What are your experiences designing with eMMCs? Leave us a comment and let us know!