ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,456,521, issued on Oct. 28, was assigned to Sandisk Technologies Inc. (Milpitas, Calif.).

"Sub-block separation in NAND memory through word line based selectors" was invented by Motoo Ohaga (Nagoya, Japan), Shinsuke Yada (Nagoya, Japan), Naohiro Hosoda (Asachi-cho, Japan) and Hiroyuki Ogawa (Nagoya, Japan).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "As block sizes in NAND memory continue to increase in size and density, in can be useful to access less than all of the block, such as sub-block or subset of the blocks NAND strings, in order to reduce read disturbs, reduce power consumption, and increase operating speeds. Although this sort of separation ...