Tidal Systems/Micron Assigned Patent

Tidal Systems, Inc., Santa Clara, CA, (acquired by Micron Technology, Inc.) has been assigned a patent (9,959,077) developed by Lee, Meng Kun, Cupertino, CA, and Thakore, Priyanka, San Jose, CA, for a “data randomization for flash memory.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: “Data words written to an SSD device, or other device or output data stream, may be randomized using a seed based on physical addressing information, such as a page address, column address, and a cycle count for the page address. This enables the storage and de-randomization of variable length data blocks stored at random locations within a page without requiring storage of additional data, which would make recovery impossible if lost in prior approaches. The page address, column address, and block address are physical attributes of the storage location for the data word and do not need to be saved and therefore will not be lost making recovery of the seed always possible. The cycle count can be saved and, if lost, limited trials with range of cycle counts can be exercised to de-randomize the data word and decoding may be used to determine whether descrambling was successful.”

The patent application was filed on November 18, 2014 (14/546,997).