Proceedings of the Non-Volatile Memories Workshop (NVMW), San Diego, California, March 2013.
We forecast that bad block management will remain critical for future systems built with advanced and emerging memory technologies. We argue that the conventional block retirement and sparing approach---a block is retired as soon as it shows faulty behavior---is overly conservative. We observe that it is highly unlikely that all faulty bits in a block manifest errors. Consequently, we propose data dependent sparing, a relaxed block retirement and sparing approach that recycles faulty storage blocks.