4-D parity codes for soft error correction in aerospace applications

Abstract

In order to reduce the overall system cost, the aerospace industry has been increasingly using commercial off the shelf components in their products. The sensitivity of these products to radiation induced soft errors becomes a major concern. In this paper, we propose a method to increase the reliability of a given off the shelf component by manipulating the software-based error correction algorithm of its already existing 4-D parity codes. The paper shows that using this approach, it is possible to correct triple bit adjacent errors, without adversely affecting the performance or memory usage.