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US 8,601,202 B1Granted
Full chip wear leveling in memory device
AssigneeMicron Technology, Inc.
InventorsRobert Melcher, Sean Eilert, Gerard Kreifels
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Methods and systems to wear level a non-volatile memory device across partitions. In an embodiment, a memory device performs background operations to swap host addressable memory partitions with a spare memory partition outside of the host address space. In one embodiment, the background inter-partition wear leveling operations are appended to a user erase operations.
Claims21
A method of wear leveling cells in a non-volatile memory device, the method comprising:
- copying a data pattern of a swap partition of the memory device into a spare partition of the memory device, the swap partition being a logical partition mapped to a physical partition addressable by a host external to the memory device, the swap partition data pattern including data in a first physical partition and a second physical partition, the copying of the data pattern excluding data in a physical parameter partition, the spare partition being a logical partition mapped to a physical partition outside of the host address space;
- reassigning the logical address of the swap partition to the physical spare partition to rotate the physical location of the swap partition data pattern;
- and
- repeating the copying and reassigning every time a triggering event occurs to iteratively swap partitions of the memory device.
1 more element
A non-volatile memory device, comprising:
- an array of memory cells arranged into a plurality of physical partitions including host addressable partitions and a non-host addressable partition;
- a controller configured to copy a data pattern of a selected host addressable partition into the non-host addressable partition, to swap the partitions by reassigning the logical address of the selected host addressable partition to the non-host addressable partition to render the non-host addressable partition addressable, the selected host addressable partition data pattern to include data in a first physical partition and a second physical partition, the copying of the data pattern to exclude data in a first physical parameter partition, and to rotate the swap sequentially through each of the host addressable partitions by repeating the copying and reassigning each time a triggering event occurs.
A wireless communication device, comprising:
- a transceiver to receive over-the-air signals;
- a processor core coupled to the transceiver;
- a non-volatile memory embedded with the first processor core, the non-volatile memory including an array of memory cells arranged into a plurality of physical partitions including host addressable partitions to store data operated on by the processor and a non-host addressable partition;
- and
- a controller configured to copy a data pattern of a selected host addressable partition into the non-host addressable partition, to swap the partitions by reassigning the logical address of the selected host addressable partition to the non-host addressable partition to render the non-host addressable partition addressable, the selected host addressable partition data pattern to include data in a first physical partition and a second physical partition, the copying of the data pattern to exclude data in a physical parameter partition, and to rotate the swap sequentially through each of the host addressable partitions by repeating the copying and reassigning each time a triggering event occurs.
2 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.