CyclicRedundancyCheckCodesUsedintheSNSReal-TimeDataLink.pdfVIP

SNS-NOTE-CNTRL-45 Cyclic Redundancy Check Codes Used in the SNS Real-Time Data Link E. Bjorklund Abstract The Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) is an efficient and powerful tool for detecting errors in transmitted messages. The SNS Real-Time Data Link (RTDL) system employs two levels of CRC checking. Each RTDL frame is transmitted with an 8-bit CRC generated in hardware by the V105S RTDL Encoder module. In addition, the entire RTDL message contains a 24-bit software-generated CRC which is sent as the last RTDL frame (frame number 255) in the message. This tech-note discusses the details of the RTDL CRC implementation, with particular emphasis on the 24-bit CRC RTDL frame, since its implementation is a recent addition. Introduction: Some CRC Basics The basic concept behind CRCs is to treat the message as one giant binary number and divide it by a fixed value using modulo-2 polynomial arithmetic. The remainder of that division becomes the CRC “check-sum”. The reasons for using modulo-2 polynomial arithmetic are: • The long-division problem is reduced to a simple series of shift and XOR operations, making it efficient to implement in hardware. • The mathematical properties of modulo-2 polynomial arithmetic can be used to determine and prove certain desirable characteristics of the polynomial chosen to be the divisor (also referred to as the “generator polynomial”). One useful property of modulo-2 polynomial arithmetic is that the string obtained by appending the CRC to the end of the message is guaranteed to be an exact multiple of the generator polynomial. Consequently, if yo