ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 12 -- United States Patent no. 12,249,364, issued on March 11, was assigned to Micron Technology Inc. (Boise, Idaho).

"Apparatus with non-linear delay variations for scheduling memory refresh operations and methods for operating the same" was invented by Huai-Yuan Tseng (San Ramon, Calif.), Akira Goda (Tokyo), Kishore Kumar Muchherla (Fremont, Calif.), James Fitzpatrick (Laguna Niguel, Calif.), Tomoharu Tanaka (Yokohama, Japan), Eric N. Lee (San Jose, Calif.), Dung V. Nguyen (San Jose, Calif.) and David Ebsen (Minnetonka, Minn.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Methods, apparatuses and systems related to maintaining stored data are described. The apparatus may be configure...