Design of Memories with Concurrent Error Detection and Correction by Nonlinear SEC-DED Codes

In this paper we propose memory protection architectures based on nonlinear single-error-correcting, double-error-detecting (SEC-DED) codes. Linear SEC-DED codes widely used for design of reliable memories cannot detect and can miscorrect lots of errors with large Hamming weights. This may be a serious disadvantage for many modern technologies when error distributions are hard to estimate and multi-bit errors are highly probable. The proposed protection architectures have fewer undetectable errors and fewer errors that are miscorrected by all codewords than architectures based on linear codes with the same dimension at the cost of a small increase in the latency penalty, the area overhead and the power consumption. The nonlinear SEC-DED codes are generalized from the existing perfect nonlinear codes (Vasil’ev codes, Probl Kibern 8:375–378, 1962 ; Phelps codes, SIAM J Algebr Discrete Methods 4:398–403, 1983 ; and the codes based on one switching constructions, Etzion and Vardy, IEEE Trans Inf Theory 40:754–763, 1994 ). We present the error correcting algorithms, investigate and compare the error detection and correction capabilities of the proposed nonlinear SEC-DED codes to linear extended Hamming codes and show that replacing linear extended Hamming codes by the proposed nonlinear SEC-DED codes results in a drastic improvement in the reliability of the memory systems in the case of repeating errors or high multi-bit error rate. The proposed approach can be applied to RAM, ROM, FLASH and disk memories.