Freescale Assigned Patent

Freescale Semiconductor, Inc., Austin, TX, has been assigned a patent (8,255,616) developed by Ross S. Scouller, Daniel L. Andre, and Stephen F. McGinty, Austin, TX, for a "non-volatile memory device and method therefor."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A method of storing information at a non-volatile memory includes storing a first status bit at a sector header of the memory prior to erasing a sector at the memory. A second status bit is stored after erasing of the sector. Because the erasure of the sector is interleaved with the storage of the status bits, a brownout or other corrupting event during erasure of the record will likely result in a failure to store the second status bit. Therefore, the first and second status bits can be compared to determine if the data was properly erased at the non-volatile memory. Further, multiple status bits can be employed to indicate the status of other memory sectors, so that a difference in the status bits for a particular sector can indicate a brownout or other corrupting event."

The patent application was filed on Jan. 12, 2010 (12/685,856).