Soft self-synchronising codes for self-calibrating communication

Self-calibrating designs are gaining momentum in both the computation and communication worlds. Instead of relying on the worst-case characterisation of design parameters, self calibrating systems determine autonomously the boundary of correct behaviour, and set design parameters accordingly. We focus on the communication task. We model errors due to over-aggressive operation and derive a channel model. We show that self-synchronising codes achieve completely reliable communication over this channel model, and study a known example, LEDR (level encoded 2-phase dual-rail), which is an improvement of the well-known dual-rail code. Then, we introduce a family of coding schemes which are a generalisation of LEDR, and study their performance over our channel model. We observe that the wiring overhead can be significantly reduced at the expense of a limited loss in reliability. Finally, we extend our channel model to include additive noise, and show that in this more general situation a specific instance of our coding scheme has similar or better performance than LEDR, at a smaller wiring overhead.