Fault-resilient decoders and memories made of unreliable components

Abstract

In this paper we present our recent results on iterative Gallager B decoder made of unreliable logic gates. We show evidence that probabilistic behavior of a decoder due to unreliable components can be exploited to our advantage and lead to an improved performance and reduced hardware redundancy. We provide examples of such decoder behavior and give an explanation of this phenomenon using iterative decoding dynamics. Iterative decoding can be viewed as a recursive procedure for Bethe free energy function minimization, and the randomness in a message update may help the decoder to escape from local minima. The decoder operates in a stochastic fashion, but the random perturbations do not require any additional hardware as they are built-in the faulty hardware itself.