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A Study on an Error Correction Code Circuit for a Level-2 Cache of an Embedded Processor  

Kim, Pan-Ki (Department of Electrical Eng., Yonsei University)
Jun, Ho-Yoon (Department of Electrical Eng., Yonsei University)
Lee, Yong-Surk (Department of Electrical Eng., Yonsei University)
Publication Information
Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD / v.46, no.1, 2009 , pp. 15-23 More about this Journal
Abstract
Microprocessors, which need correct arithmetic operations, have been the subject of in-depth research in relation to soft errors. Of the existing microprocessor devices, the memory cell is the most vulnerable to soft errors. Moreover, when soft errors emerge in a memory cell, the processes and operations are greatly affected because the memory cell contains important information and instructions about the entire process or operation. Users do not realize that if soft errors go undetected, arithmetic operations and processes will have unexpected outcomes. In the field of architectural design, the tool that is commonly used to detect and correct soft errors is the error check and correction code. The Itanium, IBM PowerPC G5 microprocessors contain Hamming and Rasio codes in their level-2 cache. This research, however, focuses on huge server devices and does not consider power consumption. As the operating and threshold voltage is currently shrinking with the emergence of high-density and low-power embedded microprocessors, there is an urgent need to develop ECC (error check correction) circuits. In this study, the in-output data of the level-2 cache were analyzed using SimpleScalar-ARM, and a 32-bit H-matrix for the level-2 cache of an embedded microprocessor is proposed. From the point of view of power consumption, the proposed H-matrix can be implemented using a schematic editor of Cadence. Therefore, it is comparable to the modified Hamming code, which uses H-spice. The MiBench program and TSMC 0.18 um were used in this study for verification purposes.
Keywords
ECC; low-power ECC; embedded ECC;
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