Patent ID: 8898535

Claim:
Apparatus for detecting a faulty behavior of an error corrector due to a transient or permanent hardware error, comprising: the error corrector configured to correct a correctable bit error within at least a faulty subset of bits of a faulty coded binary word coded by an error correction code and to output the coded binary word in which the correctable bit error is corrected; and an error detector configured to receive an error detector input binary word based on at least an output of the error corrector, and determine an error detection bit sequence indicating whether or not the error detector input binary word is a code word of the error correction code; wherein the apparatus is configured to detect the faulty behavior of the error corrector in case the error detection bit sequence indicates that the error detector input binary word is not a code word of the error correction code even though a code word of the error correction code or a faulty word which is correctable by the error correction code is input into the error corrector, and wherein the error detector is configured to determine the error detection bit sequence, so that the error detection bit sequence is equal to a first predefined detection bit sequence for a first subset of code words of the error correction code and equal to a second predefined detection bit sequence for a second subset of code words of the error correction code, wherein the first predefined detection bit sequence is different from the second predefined detection bit sequence and the first subset of code words of the error correction code is different from the second subset of code words of the error correction code.