Real-Time Emulation of Multiple NAND Flash Channels by Exploiting the DRAM Memory of High-end Servers
Nikolaos Toulgaridis, Eleni Bougioukou, Theodore A. Antonakopoulos · 2018
A modular and versatile FPGA-based platform, designed for accurate emulation of multiple NAND Flash channels is presented in this work. The emulator is based on an expandable and reconfigurable hardware-software architecture that can be used for developing and testing of new NAND Flash controllers and for analyzing the behavior of existing NAND Flash controllers. The proposed emulator is based on PCIe-based FPGA boards attached to a high-end Xeon server, supports standard memory interfaces, responds in proper time and has the capability to emulate memory space in the range of a few hundred GBs per channel. The emulator has been prototyped and tested and experimental results demonstrate that all timing requirements are satisfied under maximum read/write workloads.