Efficient Constrained Codes That Enable Page Separation in Modern Flash Memories

The pivotal storage density win achieved by solid-state devices over magnetic devices in 2015 is a result of multiple innovations in physics, architecture, and signal processing. One of the most important innovations in that regard is enabling the storage of more than one bit per cell in the Flash device, i.e., having more than two charge levels per cell. Constrained coding is used in Flash devices to increase reliability via mitigating inter-cell interference that stems from charge propagation among cells. Recently, capacity-achieving constrained codes were introduced to serve that purpose in modern Flash devices, which have more than two levels per cell. While these codes result in minimal redundancy via exploiting the underlying physics, they result in non-negligible complexity increase and access speed limitation since pages cannot be read separately. In this paper, we suggest new constrained coding schemes that have low-complexity and preserve the desirable high access speed in modern Flash devices. The idea is to eliminate error-prone patterns by coding data either only on the left-most page (binary coding) or only on the two left-most pages (4-ary coding) while leaving data on all the remaining pages uncoded. Our coding schemes work for any number of levels
$q \geq 4$
per cell, offer systematic encoding and decoding, and are capacity-approaching. Since the proposed schemes enable the separation of pages, except the two left-most pages in the case of 4-ary coding, we refer to them as read-and-run (RR) constrained coding schemes as opposed to schemes adopting read-and-wait for other pages. The 4-ary RR coding scheme is introduced in order to limit the rate loss incurred by the binary RR coding schemes, and we show that our 4-ary RR coding scheme is also competitive when it comes to complexity and error propagation. We analyze the new RR coding schemes and discuss their impact on the probability of occurrence of different charge levels. We also demonstrate the performance improvement achieved via RR coding on a practical triple-level cell Flash device.