A novel scheme for concurrent error detection of OLS parallel decoders

Abstract

This paper presents a concurrent error detection (CED) scheme for Orthogonal Latin Square (OLS) parallel decoders. Different from a CED scheme found in the technical literature that protects only the syndrome generator, the proposed CED scheme protects the whole OLS decoder for single stuck-at faults. This paper presents the detailed design and analysis of the proposed CED scheme and shows that it is strongly fault secure (SFS) for single stuck-at faults. Extensive simulation results are also provided; different figures of merit such as area, power dissipation, gate depth and coverage are assessed. It is shown that the proposed decoder designs for (n,k) t-bit error correcting OLS codes (k=16...256; t=2...5) have modest overheads. However, the most significant advantage of the proposed scheme is that it achieves 100% fault coverage for the whole CED circuit, thus providing a very efficient and fully fault tolerant implementation.