On-the-fly row-syndrome generation for dvd controller ecc

Abstract

A digital-versatile disk (DVD) playback-controller integrated circuit (IC) writes data to a block in an embedded memory buffer while row syndromes are being generated in parallel. The block has rows and columns. Row syndromes are generated on-the-fly as the data is written from the DVD disk to the memory buffer. Row syndrome generation thus requires no memory access cycles. Column syndrome generation is delayed until row correction is completed. Once errors in the rows identified by the row syndromes are corrected, column syndromes are generated. The bytes received from the DVD disk for the current row are accumulated into intermediate row syndromes. Received bytes are accumulated for the row until all of the row's bytes have been received and accumulated. The final accumulated row syndromes are written to the embedded memory buffer for later row error-correction. The row syndromes are later sent from the embedded memory buffer to an error corrector that detects, locates, and corrects any errors in the rows. A separate SRAM buffer for error correction is eliminated even though on-the-fly performance is achieved.