Non-volatile memory system card with flash erasable sectors of EEprom cells including a mechanism for substituting defective cells

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United States Patent

5535328

Link to this page

http://www.wikipatents.com/5535328.html

Inventor(s)

Harari; Eliyahou (Los Gatos, CA), Norman; Robert D. (San Jose, CA), Mehrotra; Sanjay (Milpitas, CA)

Abstract

A system of Flash EEprom memory chips with controlling circuits serves as non-volatile memory such as that provided by magnetic disk drives. Improvements include selective multiple sector erase, in which any combinations of Flash sectors may be erased together. Selective sectors among the selected combination may also be de-selected during the erase operation. Another improvement is the ability to remap and replace defective cells with substitute cells. The remapping is performed automatically as soon as a defective cell is detected. When the number of defects in a Flash sector becomes large, the whole sector is remapped. Yet another improvement is the use of a write cache to reduce the number of writes to the Flash EEprom memory, thereby minimizing the stress to the device from undergoing too many write/erase cycling.

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Reference	Relevancy	Comments	Reference	Relevancy	Comments
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5123016 Muller et al. Jun,1992	Your vote accepted [0 after 0 votes]		5043940 Harari Aug,1991	Your vote accepted [0 after 0 votes]
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