Renesas Technology Corp.

Makoto Obata

Nagamasa Mizushima

Satoshi Yoshida

Atsushi Shiraishi

Atsushi Shikata

Yasuhiro Nakamura

Shigeo Kurakata

Shinsuke Asari

A memory card has external interface terminals, an interface controller connected to each of the terminals, a rewritable nonvolatile memory connected to the interface controller, and a data processor connected to the interface controller. The interface controller can perform an operation based on another command supplied from the outside in parallel with the operations of transferring a command for a data process supplied from the outside to the data processor and operating it. The interface controller has plural buffers and, after completely inputting the command for a data process from an outside to a first buffer of the plural buffers, allows data related to the other command supplied from the outside to be inputted to a second buffer of the plural buffers. The memory card can receive a command data and data to be processed subsequently from the outside without the need of waiting for the completion of the communication process between the data processor and the interface controller.

Memory card

The present invention is directed to suppress data loss caused by power shut-down during a rewriting process and to shorten time required to make a depletion check. A nonvolatile memory apparatus includes a rewritable nonvolatile memory and a card controller. The nonvolatile memory has a physical address area corresponding to a logical address and a save area. In response to a data rewrite instruction on a required logical address, the card controller stores data in a predetermined physical address area corresponding to the logical address to the save area and rewrites the data stored in the physical address area. When rewriting of the physical address area is incomplete, the card controller rewrites the data in the physical address area with the data stored in the save area. Thus, data loss caused by the power shut-down can be suppressed by data backup, and it is sufficient to make the depletion check in two places of the save area and the physical address area.

Nonvolatile memory apparatus which prevents destruction of write data caused by power shutdown during a writing process

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Chiba, Japan

Makoto Obata