A matrix based error correcting code

Error correcting codes had been an indispensable part of the data communication infrastructure dating all the way back to the advent of vacuum tube computers, for a number of quite obvious reasons. In spite of a good number of powerful codes in existence, this paper proposes a simple systematic block code that deals with burst errors and operates very much like the Hill cipher [1] in its encoding and decoding. It is not meant to outperform any other codes, but might offer a preferable tradeoff between performance and efficiency in some situations.