Fault tolerant switch fabric with control and data correction by hamming codes and error inducing check register

摘要

There is provided a dynamic switch organization for error correction of a data path. The dynamic switch organization includes a data path for transmitting data information and control information and a crosspoint switch fabric having a plurality of inputs and a plurality of outputs along the data path. The crosspoint switch fabric has an arbitration bus and crosspoint switch boards coupled to the arbitration bus such that the boards are synchronized to process data in parallel. The crosspoint switch fabric also includes a control entity for directing data from one of the inputs to a particular one of the outputs, and the data includes data bits and check bits. The control entity is distributed among the crosspoint switch boards such that each board includes a portion of the control entity. In addition, the crosspoint switch fabric includes error correction mechanism for applying an error correction scheme, namely a Hamming error correction scheme, to the data and check bits so that the error correction mechanism identifies an erroneous bit and inverts the erroneous bit in order to form corrected data. An improvement is provided to the error correction scheme by adding a feature which allows for checking whether the scheme is operating properly; to enable, checking by means of diagnostic software, an error is deliberately introduced on a particular data bit.