SMSC Holdings Assigned Patent

SMSC Holdings SARL, Luxembourg, a subsidiary of Standard Microsystems Corp., has been assigned a patent (8,489,803) developed by Gideon David Intrater, Sunnyvale, CA, for an "efficient use of flash memory in flash drives."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A storage device having non-volatile solid state memory permits efficient access by permitting multiple pending commands from a host device. A controller in the storage device stores information about each command from the host device, and determines which stored command, if any, is presently able to be performed based on the portion of the non-volatile memory and the type of access of the command. The storage device provides reduced access delays, improves R/W throughput, and avoids the cost of additional memory in the storage device, by allowing accesses to idle portions of memory to proceed, and by signaling the host device when the storage device is able to accept data to be written to portions of the non-volatile memory already active due to a previous command."

The patent application was filed on Dec. 14, 2009 (12/637,322).