Balanced Modulation for Nonvolatile Memories

Abstract

This paper presents a practical writing/reading scheme in nonvolatile memories, called balanced modulation, for minimizing the asymmetric component of errors. The main idea is to encode data using a balanced error-correcting code. When reading information from a block, it adjusts the reading threshold such that the resulting word is also balanced or approximately balanced. Balanced modulation has suboptimal performance for any cell-level distribution and it can be easily implemented in the current systems of nonvolatile memories. Furthermore, we studied the construction of balanced error-correcting codes, in particular, balanced LDPC codes. It has very efficient encoding and decoding algorithms, and it is more efficient than prior construction of balanced error-correcting codes.