Independent bad block management for mass storage flash memory arrays

As flash memory has advantages of high data throughput, high storage density, low power consumption and low cost, it has been widely used in the applications of high speed data acquisition and massive data storage. However, the flash chip generates bad blocks during its service life, which leads to the loss of data. Hence a bad block management in the system of flash memory array is essential to ensure the reliability of the data. The bad block management affects the storage capacity utilization, which is the main factor of the service life of the storage array. This paper introduces a new bad block management, in which each flash chip in the array has a corresponding bad block table. The computer simulation shows that the proposed scheme can improve the capacity utilization according to the size of the array.