Robust sector ID scheme for tracking dead sectors to automate search and copydown

摘要

A brownout tolerant EEPROM emulator (18) manages memory operations at a volatile memory (20) and non-volatile memory (24) using a plurality of sector status bits (451) and forward/reverse skip flags (452, 453) stored in a sector identification record (45) of each sector to define a plurality of status indicators arranged sequentially to specify a plurality of sector configuration states for each memory sector, and to automatically bypass one or more dead sectors in the non-volatile memory array during forward copydown and reverse search operations.