'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
We investigate error-correcting codes for a the
rank-modulation scheme with an application to flash memory
devices. In this scheme, a set of n cells stores information in the
permutation induced by the different charge levels of the individual
cells. The resulting scheme eliminates the need for discrete
cell levels, overcomes overshoot errors when programming cells (a
serious problem that reduces the writing speed), and mitigates the
problem of asymmetric errors. In this paper, we study the properties
of error-correcting codes for charge-constrained errors in the
rank-modulation scheme. In this error model the number of errors
corresponds to the minimal number of adjacent transpositions required
to change a given stored permutation to another erroneous
one—a distance measure known as Kendall’s τ-distance.We show
bounds on the size of such codes, and use metric-embedding techniques
to give constructions which translate a wealth of knowledge
of codes in the Lee metric to codes over permutations in Kendall’s
τ-metric. Specifically, the one-error-correcting codes we construct
are at least half the ball-packing upper bound