Designs of Flash and Associative Memories

Speaker: Doctor Eitan Yaakobi

Host Faculty: Professor Elza Erkip

Abstract

Flash is the leading technology for non-volatile memory today. However, flash suffers from an asymmetry between cell programming and cell erasing; while it is easy to increase a cell charge, reducing its charge requires erasing a large block of cells. Block erasures are not only time-consuming, but also degrade the lifetime of the memory. Rewriting algorithms are one of the efficient approaches to mitigate the lifetime constraint and improve endurance. I will present recent advances in rewriting algorithms as well as generalizations of the work of Rivest and Shamir on Write Once Memories.

The second part of this talk considers associative memories, where the focus is on efficient management and retrieval of information. Our approach is inspired by our understanding of the information processing in the brain. The human brain stores information by associations and this organization leads to efficient data retrieval. I will present results related to the concept of uncertainty in associative memories and show its connection to Levenshtein’s sequences reconstruction problem.

About the Speaker

Eitan Yaakobi is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he works with Prof. Shuki Bruck. He is also affiliated with the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California, San Diego. He received a PhD. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Siegel, Prof. Alexander Vardy, and Prof. Jack Wolf. He received the Marconi society young scholar award in 2009 and was a recipient of the Intel Ph.D. fellowship in 2010-2011. His research interests include information and coding theory with applications to non-volatile memories, associative memories, data storage and retrieval, and voting theory.