Error correction based on hamming distance preserving in arithmetical and logical operations

Abstract

The traditional approach to fault tolerant computing involves replicating computation units and applying a majority vote operation on individual result bits. This approach, however, has several limitations; the most severe is the resource requirement. This paper presents a new method for fault tolerant computing where for a given error rate, the hamming distance between correct inputs and faulty inputs as well as the hamming distance between a correct result and a faulty result is preserved throughout processing; thereby enabling correction of up to transient faults per computation cycle. The new method is compared and contrasted with current protection methods and its cost / performance is analyzed.