Convolutional Coding for SEU mitigation

Abstract

Convolutional coding is usually exploited to protect data transmitted over channels, where they are more susceptible to errors. However in recent years, an increasing interest has been drawn to the problem of radiation-induced temporary faults, also called soft errors, which corrupt memory content even during the normal functioning of a system. In this paper, a mitigation technique for the protection of critical data in electronic devices from transient errors that manifest themselves as bit-flips in memory is proposed. In order to cope with this problem we take advantage of convolutional codes and we introduce two architectures to protect memory content with little area and performance overheads. A coding-decoding scheme implemented using sequential logic. The encoding is performed as in classical convolutional encoding, processing the input stream with a shift-register based architecture. The decoder, however, differs from classical decoding schemes in terms of complexity.