Patent ID: 8261013

Claim:
A method of addressing a memory having a plurality of flash memory chips organized in erasable blocks, wherein the blocks contain writable sectors, and a sector can only be written if the block is an erased block, the method which comprises: each time a sector write command is to be executed, concerning a sector that has already been written, providing a changed address conversion and writing to an alternative memory block address of a memory block having a sector that is empty or erased; if the alternatively addressed sector has already been written, providing with the address conversion table another memory block address, in a memory block that is to be erased, as a new alternative memory block address, and writing to the corresponding sector, and writing the contents of the corresponding sectors of the newly associated memory block to the sectors that are still free in the memory block that was alternatively addressed before; associating an erase counter with each memory block representing a count of its erase operations; and until a defined threshold value of an erase counter is reached, each time an alternative memory block is provided, searching for a memory block with a low erase counter value on the same flash memory chip; and when the defined threshold value is exceeded, searching all flash memory chips for a memory block with a low erase counter value and providing the memory block thus found as the alternative memory block.