Securing the contents of a memory device

摘要

A memory device may be equipped with quick erase capability to secure the contents of the memory device. The quick erase capability may effectively permanently disable access to data stored in the memory device instantaneously upon a command being issued, making all previous data written to the memory device unreadable. The quick erase capability may allow use of the memory device for new write operations and for reading the newly written data immediately once the erase command is received and executed. The quick erase capability may begin a physical erase process of data not newly written without altering other aspects of the quick erase. Aspects may be accomplished with one or more bits per row in a memory device.

主权项

1. A dynamic random access memory (DRAM) device, comprising:
a data storage array on the DRAM device to store data, the data storage array including two or more rows, each row having two or more storage cells; a row version storage on the DRAM device for each row of the array to store a row version value; a group version data storage on the DRAM device to store a group version value; and a security controller on the DRAM device configured to respond to receiving an erase request by:
disabling read access for all rows of the data storage array of the DRAM device, andchanging the group version value to a new group version value, wherein a host is prohibited from setting a group version value stored in the group version data storage.