US Patent 7099194 Error recovery for nonvolatile memory

An error recovery technique is used on marginal nonvolatile memory cells. A marginal memory cell is unreadable because it has a voltage threshold (VT) of less than zero volts. By biasing adjacent memory cells, this will shift the voltage threshold of the marginal memory cells, so that it is a positive value. Then the VT of the marginal memory cell can be determined. The technique is applicable to both binary and multistate memory cells.