Challenges and opportunities for information theory-based design of Phase Change Memories

Phase Change Memory (PCM) definitely represents one of the most promising technologies among the non-volatile memories to be used in the next decade. Even though the noise resilience of PCMs looks to be very strong, an information theory-based design may improve the error-rate performance of the PCM reading process. In this paper, we introduce a channel model for the information recovery in PCMs and discuss the related mutual information. Experimental results are provided in order to highlight relationships between information recovery performance, electrical parameters of the memory cell, and the sensitivity of the reading architecture. This information theory-based point of view represents a base for an effective optimization of the error-rate performance during the PCM reading process and opens the path to very interesting new research lines.