PMC-Sierra/Microsemi Assigned Patent

PMC-Sierra, Inc. (acquired by Microsemi), Sunnyvale, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,176,812) developed by Northcott, Philip L., Coquitlam, CA, Geiger, Peter Dau, Granite Bay, CA, and Sadowsky, Jonathan, West Sacramento, CA, for a “systems and methods for storing data in page stripes of a flash drive.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Apparatus and methods provide relatively low uncorrectable bit error rates, low write amplification, long life, fast and efficient retrieval, and efficient storage density such that a SSD can be implemented using relatively inexpensive MLC flash for an enterprise storage application. Data is stored in page stripes. The page stripes can have varying amounts of payload capacity based on selected error correction code strength. Allocation blocks can be divided into journaling cells, correspond to minimum units of data for which a journaling engine or flash translation layer has a logical-to-physical mapping.“

The patent application was filed on May 22, 2012 (13/477,568).