Error Correction Coding (ECC) - 2.2 English

Semi-Ternary CAM Search LogiCORE IP Product Guide (PG319)

Document ID
PG319
Release Date
2021-07-27
Version
2.2 English

All memories in the CAM database are ECC protected. There are eight additional ECC bits for every address in a 64-bit wide memory. The eight additional bits are only used for ECC and can not be used for storage. 64-bit wide memories are always referred in this document (even though 72 bits are used).

A scrubbing mechanism starts regularly (approximately 1 ms interval) and reads every memory address of the CAM in the background using idle cycles. If a single-bit error is detected during scrubbing, the error is corrected permanently by writing the corrected data back to the memory. Single-bit errors detected during lookup operations are corrected dynamically. If a double-bit error is detected during lookup, there will be no match. In general, if double-bit errors are detected during lookups it is recommended to drop the packet issuing the lookup. There are two statistic counters for ECC:
Single-bit errors
This counter increments for errors detected and corrected during scrubbing.
Double-bit errors
This counter increments for double-bit errors detected during scrubbing.
The address of the first failing RAM location is stored in a register for diagnostic purposes. There are two status outputs related to ECC: Single-bit/double-bit error detected. The outputs are valid for one cycle (Lookup Interface clock domain) whenever an error is detected by the ECC scrubber. The status outputs can be used to trigger a CPU interrupt. When the CPU reads the statistics counters the counters are cleared.

The software API provides a debug function to enable insertion of single-bit/double-bit errors during write operations. With the error insertion enabled subsequent insert/update/delete operations will store data in memory with errors. Note that it takes up to 2 ms before the ECC scrubber detects the errors which can be observed on the status outputs / error counters.