Patent ID: 7457909

Claim:
A method of controlling write/erase operations in a memory device, the method comprising: dividing the memory device in physical blocks, wherein each physical block is comprised of a number of pages; considering the memory device as comprising consecutive virtual blocks, each virtual block including consecutive sectors; associating with each virtual block a virtual block number; selecting a size of said virtual blocks equal to a multiple of a size of said physical blocks; and creating a virtual-to-physical mapping table having entries that each store a pointer to a root node of a tree structure having a number of child nodes, the tree structure linking logically a set of physical blocks in the memory device, the set of physical blocks representing one of said virtual blocks, the root node comprising a physical block number of one of the set of physical blocks used as root, a pointer to a left child node, a pointer to a right child node, and the number of child nodes currently present in said tree structure.