Abstract:
This report documents the activities and results of the fiscal year 2009 (FY09) funding for the NASA Electronic Parts
and Packaging (NEPP) program for non-volatile memory (NVM) devices.
The FY09 task was divided into two main efforts:
1. Development of in-house measurement capability for flash devices
2. Reliability characterization of multi-level vs. single-level flash devices
The FY09 NEPP Non Volatile Memory study was organized into these two sections in recognition of the continued
and increasing importance of NVM to NASA. All NASA missions use NVM for boot code storage and some limited
data archiving. Space-grade NVM has lagged commercial NVM development by many orders of magnitude,
however. This gap in density only continues to increase as space-grade memories remain constant in the 1–16 Mbit
levels, while commercial flash-based devices shrink in size and double in capacity every 18 months. Commercial
flash devices are now at the 32 Gbit level, 10,000 times denser than current NASA NVM.
This FY marks the beginning of a significant technological transition in NVM for NASA. The aggressive scaling of
commercial NVMs has, as a by-product, made some of the flash devices radiation-tolerant enough to be at least
considered for low-level radiation environment missions [Irom 2008]. This NEPP task is focused on understanding
the reliability and potential future applications of such highly scaled flash memories.
