On low-power error-correcting cooling codes with large distances

TL;DR

This paper investigates the maximum size of low-power error-correcting cooling codes with large distances, providing new bounds and asymptotic formulas that improve understanding of their capacity for large parameters.

Contribution

It establishes new upper bounds and asymptotic formulas for the size of LPECC codes with large distances, extending previous results to broader parameter ranges.

Findings

Derived tight bounds for large w=e+2 cases.

Proved asymptotic formulas for code size as n grows.

Extended results to q-ary codes.

Abstract

A low-power error-correcting cooling (LPECC) code was introduced as a coding scheme for communication over a bus by Chee et al. to control the peak temperature, the average power consumption of on-chip buses, and error-correction for the transmitted information, simultaneously. Specifically, an $(n, t, w, e)$-LPECC code is a coding scheme over $n$ wires that avoids state transitions on the $t$ hottest wires and allows at most $w$ state transitions in each transmission, and can correct up to $e$ transmission errors. In this paper, we study the maximum possible size of an $(n, t, w, e)$-LPECC code, denoted by $C(n,t,w,e)$. When $w=e+2$ is large, we establish a general upper bound $C(n,t,w,w-2)\leq \lfloor \binom{n+1}{2}/\binom{w+t}{2}\rfloor$; when $w=e+2=3$, we prove $C(n,t,3,1) \leq \lfloor \frac{n(n+1)}{6(t+1)}\rfloor$. Both bounds are tight for large $n$ satisfying some divisibility conditions. Previously, tight bounds were known only for $w=e+2=3,4$ and $t\leq 2$. In general, when $w=e+d$ is large for a constant $d$, we determine the asymptotic value of $C(n,t,w,w-d)\sim \binom{n}{d}/\binom{w+t}{d}$ as $n$ goes to infinity, which can be extended to $q$-ary codes.