A fault tolerant indexed 5B/6B code

The CRC and 5B/6B codes rely on re-transmission of corrupted frames rather than forward error correction. With CRC any three single-bit errors occurring randomly in the frame are detected. Also any burst of errors for which the distance between the first corrupted bit and the last corrupted bit is less than or equal to 32 bits is detected. The 5B/6B code on the other hand has the same three single-bit error detection, but the burst error-detection is capable of detecting up to 34 code bits. We present an indexed 5B/6B, used during buffering which allows error code recovery during read/write with the help of indexes. The scheme takes advantage of spare resources to reduce re-transmission delay by increasing memory reliability.