On the analysis of Reed Solomon coding for resilience to transient/permanent faults in highly reliable memories

Single event upsets (SEU), as well as permanent faults, can significantly affect the correct on-line operation of digital systems, such as memories and microprocessors; a memory can be made resilient to permanent and transient faults by using modular redundancy and coding. Different memory systems are compared; these systems utilize simplex and duplex arrangements with a combination of Reed Solomon coding and scrubbing. The memory systems and their operations are analyzed by novel Markov chains to characterize the performance for dynamic reconfiguration as well as error detection and correction under the occurrence of permanent and transient faults. For a specific Reed Solomon code, the duplex arrangement is able to cope efficiently with the occurrence of permanent faults, while the use of scrubbing allows it to cope with transient faults.