METHODS OPERATING SEMICONDUCTOR MEMORY DEVICES WITH SELECTIVE WRITE-BACK OF DATA FOR ERROR SCRUBBING AND RELATED DEVICES

摘要

A method of scrubbing errors from a semiconductor memory device including a memory cell array and an error correction circuit, can be provided by accessing a page of the memory cell array to provide a data that includes sub units that are separately writable to the page of memory and to provide parity data configured to detect and correct a bit error in the data and selectively enabling write-back of a selected sub unit of the data responsive to determining that the selected sub unit of data includes a correctable error upon access as part of an error scrubbing operation.

主权项

1. A method of operating a semiconductor memory device including a memory cell array and an error correction circuit, the method comprising:
selecting at least one sub-page of a page of memory cells in the memory cell array in response to a first command received from an external memory controller; reading a first unit of data including at least two sub units of data and parity data from the sub-page, wherein the at least two sub units of data includes a first sub unit of data and a second sub unit of data, the first sub unit of data is read from a first memory location of the sub-page and the second sub unit of data is read from a second memory location of the sub-page; determining, in the error correction circuit, whether the first unit of data includes an error bit; when the first unit of data includes an error bit in the second sub unit, correcting the error bit using the parity data of the first unit of data in the error correction circuit to provide a corrected second sub unit of data; and writing back the corrected second sub unit of data to the second memory location of the sub-page.