Built-in self-repair IC logic with area optimized error-correcting codes

Integrated Circuits (ICs) suffer from malfunctioning because of permanent production errors, and transient or permanent errors during operation. ICs can be made tolerant for these errors by building in self-repair. This is implemented by the use of (known) error correction codes. These are now optimized for minimum silicon area, which essentially differs from using the classical criterion of minimal code redundancy. As compared to majority voting, our area-optimized Hamming codes and product codes offer sufficient fault protection for less than half the silicon area overhead.