50 Years of the Golomb--Welch Conjecture

Since 1968, when the Golomb--Welch conjecture was raised, it has become the main motive power behind the progress in the area of the perfect Lee codes. Although there is a vast literature on the topic and it is widely believed to be true, this conjecture is far from being solved. In this paper, we provide a survey of papers on the Golomb--Welch conjecture. Further, new results on Golomb--Welch conjecture dealing with perfect Lee codes of large radii are presented. Algebraic ways of tackling the conjecture in the future are discussed as well. Finally, a brief survey of research inspired by the conjecture is given.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figure

Codes for Asymmetric Limited-Magnitude Errors With Application to Multilevel Flash Memories

Several physical effects that limit the reliability and performance of multilevel flash memories induce errors that have low magnitudes and are dominantly asymmetric. This paper studies block codes for asymmetric limited-magnitude errors over q-ary channels. We propose code constructions and bounds for such channels when the number of errors is bounded by t and the error magnitudes are bounded by ℓ. The constructions utilize known codes for symmetric errors, over small alphabets, to protect large-alphabet symbols from asymmetric limited-magnitude errors. The encoding and decoding of these codes are performed over the small alphabet whose size depends only on the maximum error magnitude and is independent of the alphabet size of the outer code. Moreover, the size of the codes is shown to exceed the sizes of known codes (for related error models), and asymptotic rate-optimality results are proved. Extensions of the construction are proposed to accommodate variations on the error model and to include systematic codes as a benefit to practical implementation

Fault-Tolerant Dot-Product Engines

Coding schemes are presented that provide the ability to correct and detect computational errors while using dot-product engines for integer vector--matrix multiplication. Both the $L_1$-metric and the Hamming metric are considered