WD Assigned Patent

Western Digital Technologies, Inc., Irvine, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,243,525) developed by Alan Chingtao Kan, Diamond Bar, CA, for a "refreshing non-volatile semiconductor memory by reading without rewriting."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A non-volatile semiconductor memory is disclosed comprising a first memory device including a plurality of memory segments, and control circuitry operable to determine whether a memory segment in the first memory device needs refreshing, and when the memory segment needs refreshing, read data from the memory segment into a data register without rewriting the data."

The patent application was filed on Sept. 30, 2009 (12/571,330).