Error control combining Hamming and product codes for energy efficient nanoscale on-chip interconnects

Abstract

The authors propose an energy efficient error control scheme that combines simple Hamming codes with powerful product codes for deeply scaled on-chip interconnects. By using Hamming codes in low-noise environments and product codes in high-noise environments, the proposed method achieves high reliability while maintaining energy efficiency; further, hardware sharing is introduced to reduce system overhead. To achieve the same reliability in noisy environments, the proposed method uses a lower swing voltage than a conventional Hamming implementation, resulting in a 30% energy reduction; an energy reduction of up to 40% is achieved compared to a multi-error correcting BCH code.