The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Dec. 14, 1999
Filed:
Jun. 30, 1997
Ashok Singhal, Redwood City, CA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
A system for N-bit part failure detection using n-bit error detecting codes where n is less than N is disclosed. In a computer system having storage devices N bits wide and an error detection and correction capability of less than N bits, bit assignments are made so that storage device failures will be detectable because of the manner the effect of a part failure is distributed among multiple codewords. Consequently 8 and 16 bit wide DRAMs may be used in a memory system using error detection and correction codes which are not capable of detecting 8 or 16 bit errors in a codeword, and still preserve the ability to detect the worst errors possibly caused by a part failure. Further, since error detection and correction codes with a predefined error detection and correction capability generally do not double in number of bits required when the data portion of a codeword doubles, the present invention allows use of the remaining bits when using larger data words, not only for special data, but also for another error detection and correction code for the special data, all still preserving the ability to detect any part failures, even when a part failure causes a number of total bit errors far exceeding the error detection capability of the error detection and correction codes.