Error-Correcting WOM Codes: Concatenation and Joint Design

Abstract

We construct error-correcting write-once memory (WOM) codes that guarantee correction of any specified number of errors in $q$ -level memories. The constructions use suitably designed short $q$ -ary WOM codes and concatenate them with outer error-correcting codes over different alphabets using suitably designed mappings. With a new storage-efficiency measure, we call EC-rate and show that for common error types the codes save redundancy and implementation complexity over straightforward concatenation. In addition to constructions for guaranteed error correction, we extend the error-correcting WOM scheme to binary multi-level coding for random errors, and toward soft-decision decoding provide an efficient way to extract reliability information without using higher-precision readout.