Writing on dirty flash memory: Combating inter-cell interference via coding with side information

Abstract

High-density flash memories suffer from inter-cell interference (ICI) which threatens the reliability of stored data. In order to cope with the ICI problem, we propose a channel coding scheme with channel state information of flash memories (i.e., side information of ICI). This side information is obtained before writing data into flash memories and incorporated during the encoding stage. We show that flash memories under ICI problem can be transformed into the model of memory with defective cells due to the unique asymmetry property between write (page write) and erase (block erase) operations. Then, the channel coding for memory with defective cells is employed to combat ICI. Simulation results support that the proposed scheme with the ICI side information can effectively improve the decoding failure probability.