Design EG-LDPC codes for soft error mitigation in memory

Abstract

As the feature sizes of integrated circuits decreasing, single event transient (SET) in combinational circuits can not been ignored any longer. In this paper, a novel fault-secure scheme for memory has been proposed by studying the structural features of Euclidean Geometry-Low Density Parity Check (EG-LDPC) codes. The proposed fault-secure scheme can tolerate transient faults both in the storage cell and in the encoder and decoder, using the parallel majority decoding and the feedback loop structure. In order to improve the decoding speed, an algorithm is presented, which can reduce the majority decoding of EG-LDPC codes into two steps. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can suit ordinary data width (e.g., 2 n bits) in memory. Finally, the correcting capability and the reliability of the proposed scheme are analyzed. The experiment results reveal that the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of the proposed scheme is 419%, 104% and 118% compared with that of Hamming code, Matrix code and Reed-Muller code, respectively.