Increasing the memory performance of flash memory devices by writing sectors simultaneously to multiple flash memory devices

摘要

The present invention includes a digital system having a controller semiconductor device coupled to a host and a nonvolatile memory bank including a plurality of nonvolatile memory devices. The controller transfers information, organized in sectors, with each sector including a user data portion and an overhead portion, between the host and the nonvolatile memory bank and stores and reads two bytes of information relating to the same sector simultaneously within two nonvolatile memory devices. Each nonvolatile memory device is defined by a row of memory locations wherein corresponding rows of at least two semiconductor devices maintain two sectors of information therein with the overhead information relating to the two sectors maintained in one of the memory rows of the nonvolatile memory device. Each 32 sectors of information defines a block identified by a virtual physical block address with a block of information expanding between two memory devices wherein an even and an odd byte of a sector is simultaneously read from or written to two nonvolatile memory devices. In another embodiment, the controller stores an entire sector of information within a single nonvolatile memory device and reads from or writes to, a sector of information by processing corresponding bytes of at least two sectors in two nonvolatile memory devices simultaneously.