Sandisk Technologies Assigned Patent

Sandisk Technologies, Inc., Plano, TX, has been assigned a patent (8,261,136) developed by Manuel Antonio D’Abreu, El Dorado Hills, CA, and Stephen Skala, Fremont, CA, for a "method and device for selectively refreshing a region of a memory of a data storage device."

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: "A method and device for selectively refreshing a region of a non-volatile memory of a data storage device is disclosed. In a particular embodiment, a method is disclosed that includes comparing a time stamp received from a host device to a first time stamp retrieved from a data storage device for a first region of a non-volatile memory, the first region including a least recently accessed region of a memory array within the data storage device. The method also includes selectively refreshing the first region based on a comparison of a difference between the time stamp received from the host device and the first time stamp as compared to a threshold, where the threshold is adjusted based on a first error count corresponding to a number of errors detected by an ECC engine with respect to data retrieved from the first region."

The patent application was filed on June 29, 2009 (12/494,210).