Patent ID: 8578088

Claim:
A method for writing and reading data in electrically erasable and programmable nonvolatile memory cells comprising: defining data pages in a first nonvolatile memory zone; defining in the data pages programmable data blocks; defining in a second nonvolatile memory zone, metadata pages comprising metadata structures associated with the data pages present in the first nonvolatile memory zone and wherein each of the data pages is associated with a metadata structure of the metadata pages, each metadata structure including a wear counter containing a value representative of a number of times that the data page associated with the metadata structure has been erased; attributing to each metadata page a wear counter containing a value representative of a number of times that a metadata page to which the wear counter is attributed has been erased; arranging a wear counter of a metadata page inside the metadata page; before erasing the metadata page, writing in the second nonvolatile memory zone a temporary information structure comprising: an address in the second nonvolatile memory zone of the metadata page and a wear counter of the metadata page; and after having erased the metadata page: reading the wear counter from the temporary information structure; incrementing the wear counter read from the temporary information structure; and writing the incremented wear counter in the erased metadata page.