NVMdurance Assigned Patent on Adaptive Flash Tuning

NVMDurance Ltd., with its approach to extending the endurance of flash devices and enabling 3D NAND, has announced that patent number 9,569,120 developed by Joe Sullivan and Conor Ryan, both of Limerick, Ireland, has been granted in the USA for Adaptive Flash Tuning.

This is the fifth patent granted by the company, founded in 2013. The first was granted in the USA in 2015. Two others have been granted in USA (US Pat No 8,984,210 and US Pat No 9,262,319), one in China (ZL 20`0 8 0052625.2; NVMD-002CN), and one in Ireland (S85799).

This patent covers company’s Pathfinder and Navigator software, which discover optimal flash trim sets for the target application and implement a set of optimization techniques that constantly monitor the NAND flash health and autonomically adjusts the operating parameters in real time.

Before the flash memory product goes into production, Pathfinder determines multiple sets of viable flash register values, using a custom-built suite of machine-learning techniques. Then, running on the flash memory controller utilized in SSDs or other storage product, company’s Navigator chooses which of these predetermined sets to use for each stage of life to increase the flash memory endurance.

Firm’s software ensures that the flash lasts as long as possible without disclosure of ‘test’ mode’ information from the flash manufacturer. In an offline characterization phase, ‘test chips’ from a batch of recently manufactured flash memory chips are used to simulate various usage scenarios and measure the performance effects of writing and attempting to read test patterns written with different sets of operating parameters over time, simulating desired retention periods.

“The granting of this Adaptive Flash Tuning patent further proves how NVMdurance extends endurance and provides the ability to optimize NAND flash memory for the intended application,” said Pearse Coyle, CEO, NVMdurance. “We will continue to file patent claims around the world to protect our unique solution.“