Improving Soft Error Correction Capability of 4-D Parity Codes

In order to reduce overall system costs, the aerospace industry has been increasingly using commercial off the shelf components in their products. The sensitivity of these products to radiation induced soft errors becomes a major concern. In this paper, we propose a method to increase the reliability of a given off the shelf component by manipulating the software-based error correction algorithm of its already existing 4-D parity codes. The paper shows that using this approach, it is possible to correct triple bit adjacent errors, without adversely affecting the performance or memory usage. Furthermore, we discuss the results of implementing and validating the proposed approach in practice on PIC microcontrollers.