Unequal Error Protection Codes Derived from Double Error Correction Orthogonal Latin Square Codes

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in multi-bit error correction codes (ECCs) to protect SRAM memories. This has been caused by the increased number of multiple errors that memories suffer as technology scales. To be suitable to protect an SRAM memory, an ECC has to be decodable in parallel and with low latency. Among the codes proposed for memory protection are orthogonal latin square (OLS) codes that provide low latency decoding and a modular construction. For some applications, like multimedia or signal processing, the effect of errors on the memory bits can be very different depending on their position on the word. Therefore, in these cases, it is more effective to provide different degrees of error correction for the different bits. This is done with unequal error protection (UEP) codes. In this paper, UEP codes are derived from double error correction (DEC) OLS codes. The derived codes are implemented for an FPGA platform to evaluate the decoder complexity and latency. The results show that the new codes can be implemented with lower decoding delay than traditional SEC-DED codes and with a cost similar to that of both DEC OLS and SEC-DED codes.