A new coding scheme for fault tolerant 4-phase delay-insensitive codes
Florian Huemer, Jakob Lechner, Andreas Steininger · 2016
Delay-insensitive (DI) codes are usually prone to transient faults occurring during an ongoing transmission. For most DI code words even a single transient can turn an incomplete transmission into a complete code word, which is different from the originally sent one. In this paper we therefore propose a novel two-step data encoding scheme that combines DI and error detecting codes. Our solution exploits the inherent fault resilience of DI codes to achieve a low coding overhead. For analyzing this fault resilience we use methods from graph theory. In contrast to existing approaches we carefully avoid the introduction of timing assumptions to mask faults. The presented coding scheme is generic and can, in principle, be used with any 4-phase DI code. We show how to apply it to m-of-n codes and analyze the resulting coding efficiency.