Double and Triple Adjacent Errors Detection through Enhanced Hamming Codes

Abstract

Hamming codes that can correct one error per word are widely used to protect memories or registers from soft errors. The once-ephemeral radiation-induced soft error has become a key threat to advanced commercial electronic components and systems. Left unchallenged, soft errors have the potential for inducing the highest failure rate of all other reliability mechanisms. As technology scales, radiation particles that create soft errors are more likely to affect more than 1 b when they impact a memory or electronic circuit. This effect is known as a multiple cell upset (MCU), and the registers or memory cells affected by an MCU are physically close. To avoid an MCU from causing more than one error in a given word, interleaving is commonly used in memories. With interleaving, cells that belong to the same logical word are placed apart such that an MCU affects multiple bits but on different words. However, interleaving increases the complexity of the memory device and is not suitable for small memories or content-addressable memories. When interleaving is not used, MCUs can cause multiple errors in a word that may not even be detected by a Hamming code. In this paper, a technique to increase the probability of detecting double and triple adjacent errors when Hamming codes are used is presented. The enhanced detection is achieved by placing the bits of the word such that adjacent errors result in a syndrome that does not match that of any single error. Double and triple adjacent errors are precisely the types of errors that an MCU would likely cause, and therefore, the proposed scheme will be useful to provide error detection for MCUs in memory designs.