Soft self-synchronising codes for self-calibrating communication

Self-calibrating designs are gaining momentum in both the computation and communication worlds. Instead of rely-ing on the worst-case characterisation of design parame-ters, self-calibrating systems determine autonomously the boundary of correct behaviour, and set design parameters accordingly. In this paper, we focus on the communication task. We model errors due to over-aggressive operation and derive a channel model. We show that self-synchronising codes achieve completely reliable communication over this channel model, and study a known example, LEDR (Level Encoded 2-Phase Dual-Rail), which is an improvement of the well-known Dual-Rail code. Then, we introduce a fam-ily of coding schemes which are a generalisation of LEDR, and study their performance over our channel model. We observe that the wiring overhead can be significantly re-duced at the expense of a limited loss in reliability. Finally, we extend our channel model to include additive noise, and show that in this more general situation a specific instance of our coding scheme has similar or better performance than LEDR, at a smaller wiring overhead.