Codes for Endurance-Limited Memories

Resistive memories, such as phase change memories and resistive random access memories have attracted significant attention in recent years due to their better scalability, speed, rewritability, and yet non-volatility. However, their limited endurance is still a major drawback that has to be improved before they can be widely adapted in large-scale systems.In this work, in order to reduce the wearout of the cells, we propose a new coding scheme, called Endurance-Limited Memories (ELM) code, that increases the endurance of these memories by limiting the number of cell programming operations. Namely, an ℓ-change t-write ELM code is a coding scheme that allows to write t messages into some n binary cells while guaranteeing that each cell is programmed at most ℓ times. In case ℓ = 1 then these codes coincide with the well-studied write-once memory (WOM) codes. We study four models of these codes which depend upon whether the encoder knows, on each write, the number of times each cell was programmed or only knows its state. For the decoder, we consider two cases which depend upon whether the decoder knows the previous state of the memory or not. For two of these models we fully characterize the capacity regions and present partial results for another model. Although only one of the four models is suitable for resistive memories, we consider all four in order to carry out a complete information-theory study of endurance-limited codes.