Software Implementation of Error Detection and Correction Against Single-Event Upsets

Bit-flips caused by single-event upsets (SEUs) are a well-known problem in computer memories. A SEU is a change of state (bit-flip) caused by one single ionizing particle (e.g., ions, electrons, photons) striking a sensitive node in a micro-electronic device. The error in the device output or in its operations caused as a result of the strike is called a SEU or a soft error. The conventional way to combat this is through error detection and correction (EDAC) circuitry, but for low-budget space missions a software implementation of the EDAC can be used. Algorithms of interest to this paper are Hamming codes, previously investigated as candidates for software based EDAC (see Shirvani et al.'s 2000 paper). The paper is focused on their cyclic version, in order to exploit the advantages of cyclic codes, but, in order to avoid their principal disadvantage, i.e., their error correction complexity, the implementation of a Hamming cyclic decoder based on its parity check matrix is proposed and evaluated in terms of frame error rate (FER) and union bound on FER results.