Patent ID: 8179731

Claim:
A storage system comprising: a first section having: a storage array including a plurality of storage elements, each storage element operable to be written to one of a discrete set of N physical states; a read circuit for selecting one or more storage elements and generating, for each selected storage element, an analog signal representative of the physical state of the selected storage element; and a modulation circuit for accepting the analog signal to form a modulated representation of the analog signal from the read circuit capable of representing greater than N different states; and a second section interfacing the first section having: a demodulation circuit for accepting the modulated representation of the analog signal from the modulation circuit to recover the analog signal; and a signal processing circuit for processing the recovered analog signal to generate a plurality of outputs, each output representing a degree of an association of the selected storage element with a different subset of one or more of the discrete set of physical states.