Solid State Drive Diagnostics Framework

Highlights

In 2013 Professional Software Associates, Inc. continued to expand on its relationship with a new customer, a leading manufacturer of Solid State Drives (SSD). This was not the first cooperation with the company, and this time we delivered a SSD Self-Test Diagnostics Framework.

Challenge

The main objective of the SSD Self-Test Diagnostics Framework project was to develop a diagnostics framework and a set of real-time performance-optimization routines to be used during the manufacture tests and quality control of each newly produced enterprise SSD. The testing had to be performed before the drive had left the factory. A large subset of diagnostics had been used for optimization of NAND Flash access algorithms to substantially extend drive lifetime.

Solution

As a part of these diagnostics, PSA’s team reviewed and ported legacy diagnostics API and test commands from the previous generation of the SSD to update the entire system. A number of enhancements were made, as well as development of proprietary algorithms, such as parallel multi-processor commands execution and support of new interleave commands providing a predetermined performance for the new high-capacity SSD. As a part of the project, the infrastructure and diagnostic commands were validated on a FGPA board in the customer’s laboratory for later integration with proprietary System-on-Chip.

In addition, we had a rotation of people that included one senior software engineer providing onsite support for our customer during the entire project.