Eliminating speed penalty in ECC protected memories

Drastic device shrinking, power supply reduction, increasing complexity and increasing operating speeds that accompanying technology scaling have reduced the reliability of nowadays ICs. The reliability of embedded memories is affected by particle strikes (soft errors), very low voltage operating modes, PVT variability, EMI and accelerated circuit aging. Error correcting codes (ECC) is an efficient mean for protecting memories against failures. A major issue with ECC is the speed penalty induced by the encoding and decoding circuits. In this paper we present an effective approach for eliminating this penalty and we demonstrate its efficiency in the case of an advanced reconfigurable OFDM modulator).