WEGENER has been granted a U.S. patent for a method that enables the “rotational use of memory to minimize erase and rewrite cycles on flash memory devices.”
This patent, awarded Jan. 20, has already been implemented in several WEGENER products, including the DTV 720 and DTV 742 digital TV processors. Video headends use these DTV products to receive and repackage off-air 8-VSB, local HD and ASI signals into IP Multicasts, and the flash memory retains the channel assignments and programming identification data that operators enter.
To gain efficiencies in size and cost, these products have a scaled down small-footprint operating system embedded in them, rather than a full version. With this architecture, such small operating systems tend to prematurely wear out non-volatile memory components (such as flash) by reading and writing to the same location repetitively whenever a critical parameter is changed. WEGENER overcomes this drawback by performing “load leveling” of the flash memory. Load leveling minimizes the number of times data is erased or rewritten within a certain block of flash memory by automatically redistributing this activity across the entire flash memory.
