Hitachi, Ltd.

Renesas Technology Corp.

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies Japan, Ltd.

Toru Matsushita

Hisashi Takano

Takehiko Hamaguchi

Futoshi Tomiyama

Yasutaka Nishida

Hideki Sawaguchi

Hideki Zaitsu

Reijiro Tsuchiya

Naoki Kobayashi

Masahiro Kageyama

Hideaki Kurata

Satoshi Noda

Kenji Kozakai

Taizo Kinoshita

Hiroshi Yoshigi

Yusuke Jono

Hisao Tanabe

Yukio Kumagai

Tatsundo Suzuki

Akihiko Ohba

To provide a technique which enables a load on a controller to be reduced by rapidly detecting n-bit errors during writing/erasing on a chip in ECC in a nonvolatile memory. A flash memory of the present invention, which is a nonvolatile memory that includes plural electrically erasable and writable nonvolatile memory cells and performs write-and-verify processing in a write operation on the nonvolatile memory cells, includes an ECC determination circuit that counts the number of bits of write error detected in the write-and-verify processing, and outputs the information, and a status register for holding pass/fail information of the write operation and the information about the number of bits of write error outputted from the ECC determination circuit.

Nonvolatile memory and nonvolatile memory apparatus

A magnetic recording/reproducing apparatus includes a partial-response equalization circuit having frequency characteristic of cutting off low-frequency signal components inclusive of DC components; and a maximum-likelihood decoder, in which a reproduced signal outputted from the reproducing head is processed by the partial-response equalization circuit and then inputted into the maximum-likelihood decoder to be data-reproduced, thereby reducing a noise and distortion on the reproduced signal and reducing a data detection error rate.

Device and signal processing circuit for magnetic recording, magnetic recording apparatus

A magnetic disk drive has a low power consumption state in which the spindle motor is stopped for reducing the average power consumption when no read or write commands have been received. When a read or write command is received, the spindle motor is started. The time it takes to complete a read command is shorter than that for a write command as measured from the receipt of the read command or write command with the spindle motor stopped in the low power consumption state.

Magnetic disk drive

A magnetic recording disk drive can prevent the deterioration of the head off-track characteristics and the reduction of the drive performance even when an erase band asymmetry resulting from a skew angle exists. A write inhibit slice value for an inner peripheral side offset is made smaller than a write inhibit slice value for an outer peripheral side offset at a position where an erase band on the inner peripheral side is greater than an erase band on the outer peripheral side, so that the adjacent track on the outer peripheral side cannot easily erase a data track. On the contrary, the inner periphery and the outer periphery are paraphrased at a position where the erase band on the outer peripheral side is greater than the erase band on the inner peripheral side.

Magnetic recording disk drive

Disclosed herewith is a method for controlling the operation of non-volatile semiconductor chips with high sequential access performance realized by smoothing out the variation of the times for writing, erasing, and reading data in/from memory cells among sectors in each of the chips.

Method of controlling the operation of non-volatile semiconductor memory chips

Data recording/reproducing signal processing circuit for magnetic recording, and perpendicular magnetic recording/reproducing apparatus using it

The video information recording and reproducing apparatus includes an inputting information part for receiving video information, a storing information part, an outputting information part for producing video information, an automatic indexing information part for automatically adding indexes to the inputted video information, a filtering video information part for automatically selecting video information to be stored from the inputting information part, and a controlling part for controlling the above elements, thereby actualizing the free time-shift viewing function, intelligent search function, and automatic video data base generation function.

Video information recording and reproducing apparatus

Growing community of inventors

Kokubunji, Japan

Toru Matsushita