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US 7,071,849 B2Granted
Fractional-Bit Systems
OwnerGuobiao Zhanginventor
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Abstract
The present invention abandons the conventional approach of incrementing bits-per-cell b by 1, but allows increments of states-per-cell N by as little as 1 between product generations. Because N is no longer an integral power of 2, b takes a fractional value, resulting in a fractional-bit system. In a fractional-bit system, cells are decoded in unit of word. By adjusting the word-width, the system efficiency can be optimized.
Claims20
An N-ary fractional-bit system, comprising:
- a first word and a second word, each comprising m N-ary cells, each N-ary cell having N possible states, where m is an integer representing the number of cells in a word and N is an integer representing the number of possible states for each cell;
- means for selecting a word from said first and second words;
- and
- an N-ary-to-binary encoder for converting said selected word into i binary bits, where i is an integer representing the number of binary outputs from said encoder and has a maximum value of n=INT[log2(Nm)], with INT[x] representing the largest integer smaller than x;
- whereby the average number of binary bits stored in each cell b is a non-integer and larger than 2.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.