Violin Assigned Patent

Violin Systems LLC, San Jose, CA, has been assigned a patent (10,754,769) developed by Bennett, Jon C. R., Sufbury, MA, for a “memory system having persistent garbage collection.“

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”Non-volatile memory systems such as those using NAND FLASH technology have a property that a memory location can be written to only once prior to being erased, and a contiguous group of memory locations need to be erased simultaneously. The process of recovering space that is no longer being used for storage of current data, called garbage collection, may interfere with the rapid access to data in other memory locations of the memory system during the erase period. The effects of garbage collection on system performance may be mitigated by performing portions of the process contemporaneously with the user initiated reading and writing operations. The memory circuits and the data may also be configured such that the data is stored in stripes of a RAID array and the scheduling of the erase operations may be arranged so that the erase operations for garbage collection are hidden from the user operations.”

The patent application was filed on December 26, 2018 (16/232,945).