Patent ID: 8230277

Claim:
Data storage control circuitry for controlling storage and retrieval of data in a cache having at least two cache ways, in which data is stored in data blocks, each of said data blocks comprising a plurality of data storage bits, said cache comprising at least one faulty data storage bit within at least some of said data blocks; said data storage control circuitry being configured to group at least one of said data blocks from said cache that has at least one faulty data storage bit with at least one other data block from a different cache way of said cache to form a group of data blocks; and a selector data store for storing indicators for each of said groups of data blocks, said indicators indicating which bits of said data blocks within a group are said non-faulty bits; data access logic responsive to an instruction to read data from a data block that is present in one of said groups of data blocks, to read each of said plurality of data storage bits from a selected one of said data blocks within said group, said one of said data blocks being selected in dependence upon said stored indicators for said group such that no faulty data storage bits are read, wherein said selector data store stores, for each group of data blocks, a set of indicators, each indicator corresponding to two or more bits of said data blocks, said set of indicators indicating which data block each of said corresponding two or more bits is to be read from, said data blocks being grouped such that at least one of said data blocks within a group comprises non-faulty bits within each of said sets of two or more bits.