Constructions of Nonbinary WOM Codes for Multilevel Flash Memories

The goal of this paper is to present constructions of high-rate nonbinary write-once memory (WOM) codes for multilevel flash memories. The constructions provided here are all based on the basic idea of mapping high-rate binary codebooks to nonbinary codebooks. The proposed codes maintain the same length and encoding complexity as their underlying binary constituents. We begin by presenting some elementary, yet rate-efficient constructions. Afterward, we consider a high-rate two-write WOM-code defined over an alphabet of size four. In addition, we consider the application of our constructions to the creation of fixed-rate WOM codes. The constructions presented in this paper improve upon the best-known code constructions for certain code lengths.