Wear leveling in eeprom emulator formed of flash memory cells

An EEPROM emulated system with wear leveling, comprising:

• an EEPROM emulated array comprising an array of non-volatile memory cells;
• and
• a wear leveling module coupled to the array of non-volatile memory cells and configured to:
• receive a program command, write data, and a logical address;
• read a current word within a sector of physical words of non-volatile memory cells in the array of non-volatile memory cells based on the logical address and an index bit, the sector of words corresponding to the logical address and comprising a first physical word, a last physical word, and one or more physical words between the first physical word and the last physical word;
• when the write data does not contain a “0” for a bit that is a “1” in the current word, skipping the programming operation;
• when the write data does contain a “0” for a bit that is a “1” in the current word, and the current word is the last physical word in the sector, programming the write data in the current word;
• and
• when the write data does contain a “0” for a bit that is a “1” in the current word, and the current word is not the last physical word in the sector, programming the write data in the next word.