An efficient error correction coding approach to tolerate soft error

Abstract

Soft errors are significant concern for circuit reliability. Among various adopted techniques to mitigate soft errors effects on system functionality, Error Correcting Code (ECC) is one of the dominant approaches since it reduces cost overhead significantly. This paper deals with a new error correcting coding approach to tolerate soft errors at processor, data path, and memory devices of a computer system. To detect soft errors, the proposed approach introduces ‘modular checking’ which in turns, is working (decoding and comparing) with even and/or odd numbers of row and column of a two-dimensional array organization of pre-encoded data set rather than the whole matrix. Hence, it reduces the cost by lessen the circuitry needed to implement the scheme and the detection time is reduced as well if the soft error is detected at early modular checking. The proposed approach is able to detect soft errors at any of bit positions and correct those efficiently with reduced cost as well as detection time in a great context.