Determination of data integrity based on sentinel cells
View Patent ↗An apparatus can have an array of memory cells and a controller coupled to the array. The controller can be configured to read a group sentinel cells of the array and without reading a number of other groups of cells of the array to determine that data stored in the number of other groups of cells lacks integrity based on a determination that data stored in the group of sentinel cells lacks integrity.
1. An apparatus, comprising:
an array of memory cells; and
a controller coupled to the array of memory cells, wherein the controller is configured to:
in response to a write command directed to a first group of memory cells of the array:
increment a write stamp;
write data to the first group and update a write stamp corresponding to the first group with the incremented write stamp regardless of a value of the incremented write stamp; and
write sentinel data to a second group of memory cells of the memory array and update a write stamp corresponding to the to the second group only when the incremented write stamp is a multiple of a particular number of increments of the incremented write stamp;
wherein the incremented write stamp corresponds to a quantity of times the array is written to at a time at which the data is written to the first group.
2. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the controller is configured to determine an integrity of the data written to the first group based on a number of errors that occur when reading the sentinel data without reading the data written to the first group.
3. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the controller is configured to store the updated write stamp corresponding to the first group in the first group.
4. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the controller is configured to store the updated write stamp corresponding to the second group in the second group only when the incremented write stamp is the multiple of the particular number of increments of the incremented write stamp.
5. The apparatus of claim 1 , wherein the controller is configured to store the updated write stamp corresponding to the first group in an entry of a table that specifies an address of the first group.