  This paper establishes information-theoretic limits in estimating a finite
field low-rank matrix given random linear measurements of it. These linear
measurements are obtained by taking inner products of the low-rank matrix with
random sensing matrices. Necessary and sufficient conditions on the number of
measurements required are provided. It is shown that these conditions are sharp
and the minimum-rank decoder is asymptotically optimal. The reliability
function of this decoder is also derived by appealing to de Caen's lower bound
on the probability of a union. The sufficient condition also holds when the
sensing matrices are sparse - a scenario that may be amenable to efficient
decoding. More precisely, it is shown that if the n\times n-sensing matrices
contain, on average, \Omega(nlog n) entries, the number of measurements
required is the same as that when the sensing matrices are dense and contain
entries drawn uniformly at random from the field. Analogies are drawn between
the above results and rank-metric codes in the coding theory literature. In
fact, we are also strongly motivated by understanding when minimum rank
distance decoding of random rank-metric codes succeeds. To this end, we derive
distance properties of equiprobable and sparse rank-metric codes. These
distance properties provide a precise geometric interpretation of the fact that
the sparse ensemble requires as few measurements as the dense one. Finally, we
provide a non-exhaustive procedure to search for the unknown low-rank matrix.
