The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 21, 1999
Filed:
Nov. 25, 1996
Chung-Wen Ma, HsinChu, TW;
Chun-Hung Lin, HsinChu, TW;
Tai-Yao Lee, HsinChu, TW;
Li-Jen Lee, HsinChu, TW;
Ju-Xu Lee, BingDong, TW;
Ting-Chung Hu, Milpitas, CA (US);
Macronix International Co., Ltd., Hsinchu, TW;
Abstract
The present application discloses methods to provide defect management, wear leveling and data security to a mass storage system implemented using flash memory. The flash memory is organized into a plurality of blocks. Each block has a special region for storing its attributes. In defect management, defects arising from manufacturing and on-the-fly defects are scanned. Defective blocks are marked by altering its attributes. The present application also discloses a wear leveling method in which the difference between the number of erasures of any two blocks (except the defective blocks) is within a predetermined value. The present application further discloses a new error detection and correction method. The same data is stored in two separate memory locations. The content of these two locations are later 'ored' or 'anded' together (depending on the nature of error giving rise to the error) to recover the correct data.