A system of Flash EEprom memory chips with controlling circuits serves as
non-volatile memory such as that provided by magnetic disk drives.
Improvements include selective multiple sector erase, in which any
combinations of Flash sectors may be erased together. Selective sectors
among the selected combination may also be de-selected during the erase
operation. Another improvement is the ability to remap and replace
defective cells with substitute cells. The remapping is performed
automatically as soon as a defective cell is detected. When the number of
defects in a Flash sector becomes large, the whole sector is remapped.
Yet another improvement is the use of a write cache to reduce the number
of writes to the Flash EEprom memory, thereby minimizing the stress to
the device from undergoing too many write/erase cycling.