MCU Tolerance in SRAMs through Low Redundancy Triple Adjacent Error Correction

(c) 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.[EN] Static random access memories (SRAMs) are key in electronic systems. They are used not only as standalone devices, but also embedded in application specific integrated circuits. One key challenge for memories is their susceptibility to radiation-induced soft errors that change the value of memory cells. Error correction codes (ECCs) are commonly used to ensure correct data despite soft errors effects in semiconductor memories. Single error correction/double error detection (SEC-DED) codes have been traditionally the preferred choice for data protection in SRAMs. During the last decade, the percentage of errors that affect more than one memory cell has increased substantially, mainly due to multiple cell upsets (MCUs) caused by radiation. The bits affected by these errors are physically close. To mitigate their effects, ECCs that correct single errors and double adjacent errors have been proposed. These codes, known as single error correction/double adjacent error correction (SEC-DAEC), require the same number of parity bits as traditional SEC-DED codes and a moderate increase in the decoder complexity. However, MCUs are not limited to double adjacent errors, because they affect more bits as technology scales. In this brief, new codes that can correct triple adjacent errors and 3-bit burst errors are presented. They have been implemented using a 45-nm library and compared with previous proposals, showing that our codes have better error protection with a moderate overhead and low redundancy.This work was supported in part by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain, through the DesTT Research Project under Grant SP20120806; in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education under Project AYA-2009-13300-C03; in part by the Arenes Research Project under Grant TIN2012-38308-C02-01; and in part by the Research Project entitled Manufacturable and Dependable Multicore Architectures at Nanoscale within the framework of COST ICT Action under Grant 1103.Saiz-Adalid, L.; Reviriego, P.; Gil, P.; Pontarelli, S.; Maestro, JA. (2015). MCU Tolerance in SRAMs through Low Redundancy Triple Adjacent Error Correction. IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems. 23(10):2332-2336. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2014.235747623322336231