CrossBit: Bitwise Computing in NAND Flash Memory with Inter-Bitline Data Communication

In-flash processing (IFP), which involves performing data computation inside NAND flash memory, holds high potential for improving the performance and energy efficiency of data-intensive application by minimizing data movement.Recent research has introduced several IFP architectures enabling bulk bitwise operations inside NAND flash chips to demonstrate this potential.However, previous IFP designs were limited to performing bitwise operations on data sensed within the same bitline, thus lacking the capability to handle more complex functions requiring interactions between data from different bitlines.This paper presents CrossBit, a new IFP architecture that enables both intra-bitline and inter-bitline operations with minimal additional circuitry integrated into commodity NAND flash memory.With the capability for inter-bitline operations, CrossBit facilitates in-flash error correction code (IF-ECC) operations, thereby enabling reliable multi-level cell (MLC) IFP.Moreover, CrossBit efficiently processes fundamental database queries that were previously inefficient with existing work that only supports intra-bitline operations.Experimental results show that the implementation of IF-ECC in CrossBit results in a substantial reduction in bit error rate (BER) for MLC operations, leading to 1.8× increase in bit-density by using MLC compared to previous IFP designs which uses SLC only.When used for accelerating fundamental database queries, CrossBit achieves notable average speedup and energy efficiency improvement of 2.1× and 2.5× compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) IFP architecture.We further demonstrate the practicality by processing the full set of end-toend database queries from the widely used Star schema benchmark, where CrossBit achieves 1.7× speedup.