Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Assigned Patent

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, has been assigned a patent (8,325,534) developed by Tien-Chung Yang, San Jose, CA, Chia-Fu Lee, Hsinchu, Taiwan, and Yue-Der Chih, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan, for a "concurrent operation of plural flash memories."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A device includes an address storage device. A first circuit includes a first flash memory, configured to sequentially receive first and second addresses and store the first address in the address storage device. The first circuit has a first set of control inputs for causing the first circuit to perform a first operation from the group consisting of read, program and erase on a cell of the first flash memory corresponding to a selected one of the first and second addresses. A second circuit includes a second flash memory, configured to receive the second address. The second circuit has a second set of control inputs for causing the second circuit to read data from a cell of the second flash memory corresponding to the second address while the first operation is being performed."

The patent application was filed on Dec. 28, 2010 (12/979,425).