813 research outputs found
Coding for Racetrack Memories
Racetrack memory is a new technology which utilizes magnetic domains along a
nanoscopic wire in order to obtain extremely high storage density. In racetrack
memory, each magnetic domain can store a single bit of information, which can
be sensed by a reading port (head). The memory has a tape-like structure which
supports a shift operation that moves the domains to be read sequentially by
the head. In order to increase the memory's speed, prior work studied how to
minimize the latency of the shift operation, while the no less important
reliability of this operation has received only a little attention.
In this work we design codes which combat shift errors in racetrack memory,
called position errors. Namely, shifting the domains is not an error-free
operation and the domains may be over-shifted or are not shifted, which can be
modeled as deletions and sticky insertions. While it is possible to use
conventional deletion and insertion-correcting codes, we tackle this problem
with the special structure of racetrack memory, where the domains can be read
by multiple heads. Each head outputs a noisy version of the stored data and the
multiple outputs are combined in order to reconstruct the data. Under this
paradigm, we will show that it is possible to correct, with at most a single
bit of redundancy, deletions with heads if the heads are
well-separated. Similar results are provided for burst of deletions, sticky
insertions and combinations of both deletions and sticky insertions
Error-Correction in Flash Memories via Codes in the Ulam Metric
We consider rank modulation codes for flash memories that allow for handling
arbitrary charge-drop errors. Unlike classical rank modulation codes used for
correcting errors that manifest themselves as swaps of two adjacently ranked
elements, the proposed \emph{translocation rank codes} account for more general
forms of errors that arise in storage systems. Translocations represent a
natural extension of the notion of adjacent transpositions and as such may be
analyzed using related concepts in combinatorics and rank modulation coding.
Our results include derivation of the asymptotic capacity of translocation rank
codes, construction techniques for asymptotically good codes, as well as simple
decoding methods for one class of constructed codes. As part of our exposition,
we also highlight the close connections between the new code family and
permutations with short common subsequences, deletion and insertion
error-correcting codes for permutations, and permutation codes in the Hamming
distance
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