Secure Flash-based memory system with fast wipe feature

A card-based Flash memory storage system comprising:

• a printed circuit board;
• a predefined number of Flash memory chips mounted on the printed circuit board, each Flash memory chip comprising a plurality of blocks, each block comprising a plurality of pages, each page representing an addressable memory location to which data may be written, the Flash memory chips arranged such that memory locations are erasable a block at a time;
• a plurality of Flash controllers connected to the flash memory chips, each Flash controller configured to:
• i) receive WRITE requests from an external host device, each WRITE request including a plurality of data pages and a logical block address (LBA) associated with each data page, and translate the LBA associated with a data page to a physical block address (PBA) associated with a physical memory location in a Flash memory chip;
• ii) shuffle the data pages in the plurality of data pages using a user key;
• and
• iii) scramble the data pages in the plurality of data pages using the user key.

A module-based Flash memory storage system comprising:

• a central system controller;
• a plurality of I/O modules connected to the central system controller, each I/O module being controlled by the central system controller to communicate with an external host;
• a plurality of cross-bar switching elements connected to the central system controller, each cross-bar switching element further connected to one or more I/O modules and configured to exchange data with the one or more I/O modules;
• and
• a plurality of card-based Flash storage systems connected to each cross-bar switching element, each card-based Flash storage system comprising a plurality of Flash controllers mounted on a printed circuit board, each Flash controller having a plurality of Flash memory chips connected thereto, each Flash memory chip comprising a plurality of blocks, each block comprising a plurality of pages, each page representing an addressable memory location to which data may be written, with memory locations in each block being erasable as a group;
• wherein each Flash controller is configured to write data to the Flash memory chips that are connected to the Flash controller in the form of page stripes, each page stripe comprising a number of data pages, each data page of a page stripe residing in a different Flash memory chip from other data pages of the page stripe, each Flash controller further configured to:
• i) shuffle the data pages of the page stripe using a user key;
• ii) scramble the shuffled data pages of the page stripe using the user key;
• and
• iii) flush the user key upon initiation of an emergency system shutdown of the module-based Flash memory storage system.