Improving Error Correction Codes for Multiple-Cell Upsets in Space Applications

Abstract

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Currently, faults suffered by SRAM memory systems have increased due to the aggressive CMOS integration density. Thus, the probability of occurrence of single-cell upsets (SCUs) or multiple-cell upsets (MCUs) augments. One of the main causes of MCUs in space applications is cosmic radiation. A common solution is the use of error correction codes (ECCs). Nevertheless, when using ECCs in space applications, they must achieve a good balance between error coverage and redundancy, and their encoding/decoding circuits must be efficient in terms of area, power, and delay. Different codes have been proposed to tolerate MCUs. For instance, Matrix codes use Hamming codes and parity checks in a bi-dimensional layout to correct and detect some patterns of MCUs. Recently presented, column¿line¿code (CLC) has been designed to tolerate MCUs in space applications. CLC is a modified Matrix code, based on extended Hamming codes and parity checks. Nevertheless, a common property of these codes is the high redundancy introduced. In this paper, we present a series of new lowredundant ECCs able to correct MCUs with reduced area, power, and delay overheads. Also, these new codes maintain, or even improve, memory error coverage with respect to Matrix and CLC codes.This work was supported by the Spanish Government under the research Project TIN2016-81075-R.Gracia-Morán, J.; Saiz-Adalid, L.; Gil Tomás, DA.; Gil, P. (2018). Improving Error Correction Codes for Multiple-Cell Upsets in Space Applications. IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems. 26(10):2132-2142. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2018.2837220S21322142261