Hardening Bus-Encoders with Power-Aware Single Error Correcting Codes

Bus encoding is a technique for decreasing the power consumption of a chip by reducing the number of bit transitions during data transmission over a bus or during memory write operations. Designers often concatenate a bus encoder with an error correcting code (ECC) encoder to guarantee the reliable and power-aware transmission of data. This paper introduces a structured technique for hardening bus-encoders to enable single error correction (SEC) while maintaining power awareness. The method is based on expurgating the Hamming code in a specific manner. The resulting power-aware (expurgated), SEC code can serve as an add-on solution, when it is desired to add error correction to an existing bus-encoder.