Tuxera Flash Memory Testing Services

Tuxera, Inc. has launched its Flash Memory Testing Services, a program designed to save engineers and systems designers time, energy, and money.

The service provides customers with guidance in choosing the right storage technology for their individualized use cases, so they can select a solution that meets their requirements for lifetime, performance and reliability.

“Tuxera’s flash Memory Testing Service saves engineers a lot of headaches and hardware costs, in particular when designing automotive storage,” said Sami Kassimäki, product manager. “Our advanced system-level testing provides insights beyond common flash memory performance and endurance benchmark testing.“

Embedded file systems designers struggle to find the time, resources, and expertise to adequately validate flash memory vendor specifications, he said. That means they may often select the more expensive flash parts to try to mitigate issues or choose a solution that satisfies limited tests but might end up failing in the field

The company draws on its decades of experience serving car manufacturers, Tier-1 suppliers and device OEMs to provide more sophisticated and thorough flash memory testing, which can reveal unexpected flash device behavior under a specific planned use case and identify possible failure points early in the development phase.

The firm’s embedded flash memory tests include several individual packages including workload analysis, lifetime testing, power fail-safety testing, and environmental testing. The tests can be bundled together to create a customized package to meet design needs.

Company’s flash memory testing offers:

• Workload analysis. It analyzes and validates configuration for performance and lifetime targets, and finds opportunities to improve the efficiency of your platform. The firm’s works with clients to analyze the project workload and gives clients the optimal configurations for your system and data management solutions.

• Lifetime testing and cost analysis. It validates storage lifetime under custom workloads to inform product decisions for managed flash devices with a holistic approach. Testing how file systems, flash devices, and applications work together provides clients with a valid and accurate estimate of flash lifetime under the intended use case.

• Power fail-safety testing. The company’s tests fault tolerance to ensure system and data reliability using its proprietary test suite to simulate several real-world power-down cases. Examining how the flash device and file system work together provides clients with a understanding of fault tolerance in the entire storage stack.

• Environmental and data retention testing. It validates device behavior throughout the device’s lifetime by determining the device’s behavior under different environmental conditions. Tests also assess whether the device can hold data for a targeted duration when powered off. That allows clients an understanding of the device’s reliability under the extreme conditions of real-world use.

“In automotive manufacturing and industrial automation, lifetime requirements combined with performance requirements place extremely high demands on storage designs,” Kassimäki said. “Validation of the flash memories for their long-term behavior is crucial, and our new service can give embedded system designers confidence in the storage system they select.“

Resources:
Understanding system integrity and how testing can help in preventing field failures WP (registration required)
Tuxera flash memory testing services (registration required)
Video: What is write amplification?
Video: What reliability means to you? – Keeping your embedded data safe – Tuxera at embedded world 2021