TAF PUBLISHING

A flash code is a coding mechanism used to store and retrieve information in a flash memory, which is simply an array of flash cells. Because of the write asymmetry property of flash cells, a flash code has to be designed carefully in order to efficiently make use of the limited number of program-erase cycles that the flash cells can physically tolerate. From the initial studies on unibit update flash codes, more recent researches have introduced the multibit update mechanism for more efficient flash codes. In this paper, we propose three different new multibit update flash codes. These flash codes were simulated in Java and compared against existing multibit update flash codes using the mean data update count as the main metric for evaluation. The results show that the proposed flash codes are very competitive with the existing multibit update flash codes, with the third proposed new flash code having superior performance for some range of data vector lengths. This indicates that the proposed flash codes make very efficient use of the Flash memory cells and, thus, may be helpful in extending the lifetime of flash devices.