[ELECTRONIC APPARATUS WITH NON-VOLATILE MEMORY AND WRITING METHOD THEREOF]

• US 20050002280A1
• Filed: 07/01/2004
• Published: 01/06/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 07/01/2003
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Delta Electronics Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Delta Electronics Incorporated
• Inventors: Liu, Bao-Kim
• Granted Patent: US 7,200,707 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 368/156
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 1/14 Time supervision arrangements, e.g. real time clock

Abstract

An electronic apparatus with non-volatile memory and writing method thereof. For a specific address of a memory block of a non-volatile address memory, it can be written only one time per hour. The writing time limit of the non-volatile memory is significantly lengthened with the writing method in the present invention when writing times to a specific memory block of the non-volatile memory is limited.

Claims

1. An apparatus for storing time-relevant data, comprising:

a controller; and

a nonvolatile memory, the controller being coupled to the non-volatile memory, wherein the nonvolatile memory comprises at least two memory blocks, which are written by said controller, said two memory blocks corresponding to different addresses for storing data referring to a time unit.

2. The apparatus as recited in claim 1, wherein the time unit is a minute.

3. The apparatus as recited in claim 1, wherein the time unit is a second.

4. The apparatus as recited in claim 1, wherein the non-volatile memory apparatus is an electrically erasable and programmable read only memory (EEPROM).

5. A method for writing time-relevant data to a non-volatile memory of an electronic apparatus, comprising:

providing at least two different addresses of memory blocks of said nonvolatile memory for storing said data referring to the same time unit;

storing a first time-relevant data to the first memory block referring to a time unit; and

storing a second time-relevant data to the second memory block referring to said time unit.

6. The method as recited in claim 5, wherein the time unit is a minute.

7. The method as recited in claim 5, wherein the time unit is a second.