Hitachi GST Assigned Patent

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, has been assigned a patent (8,185,685) developed by Robert David Selinger, San Jose, CA, for a "NAND flash module replacement for DRAM module."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "An electronic memory module according to the invention provides non-volatile memory that can be used in place of a DRAM module without battery backup. An embodiment of the invention includes an embedded microprocessor with microcode that translates the FB-DIMM address and control signals from the system into appropriate address and control signals for NAND flash memory. Wear-leveling, bad block management, garbage collection are preferably implemented by microcode executed by the microprocessor. The microprocessor, additional logic, and embedded memory provides the functions of a flash memory controller. The microprocessor memory preferably contains address mapping tables, free page queue, and garbage collection information."

The patent application was filed on Dec. 14, 2007 (12/002,188).