Super Talent Assigned Patent

Super Talent Electronics, San Jose, CA, has been assigned a patent (8,543,742) developed by Frank Yu, Palo Alto, CA, Abraham C. Ma, Fremont, CA, and Shimon Chen, Los Gatos, CA, for a “flash-memory device with RAID-type controller.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “A smart flash drive has one or more levels of smart storage switches and a lower level of single-chip flash devices (SCFD’s). A SCFD contains flash memory and controllers that perform low-level bad-block mapping and wear-leveling and logical-to-physical block mapping. The SCFD report their capacity, arrangement, and maximum wear-level count (WLC) and bad block number (BBN) to the upstream smart storage switch, which stores this information in a structure register. The smart storage switch selects the SCFD with the maximum BBN as the target and the SCFD with the lowest maximum WLC as the source of a swap for wear leveling when a WLC exceeds a threshold that rises over time. A top-level smart storage switch receives consolidated capacity, arrangement, WLC, and BBN information from lower-level smart storage switch. Data is striped and optionally scrambled by RAID controllers in all levels of smart storage switches.”

The patent application was filed on June 12, 2012 (13/494,409).