Increasing the EMI-resilience of Triplication-based Error Correction Codes for PAM-4 Line Coding in Harsh Electromagnetic Environments

When transmitting data within a harsh electromagnetic environment, Error Correction Codes have been used for many years. However, not all systems are able to overcome the incurred overhead by those Error Correction Codes. As a solution to the overhead, engineers opted for a Pulse Amplitude Modulation (PAM) technique to encode two bits into a single symbol. This line-coding technique, called PAM-4, reduces the overhead that is imposed by the Error Correction Codes. A trade-off for the reduced overhead is a reduced noise margin between each individual symbol. It is the goal of this paper to assess if different techniques and measures can be applied towards both the Error Correction Codes and the line coding to provide resilience against harsh electromagnetic conditions. This paper focuses on the occurrence of False Negatives: corrupted data deemed valid. By using a combination of techniques, it is possible to significantly reduce the amount of False Negatives within the Error Correction Codes.