A method, an apparatus, and a computer program are provided for
sequentially determining parity of stored data. Because of the inherent
instabilities that exist in most memory arrays, data corruption can be a
substantial problem. Parity checking and other techniques are typically
employed to counteract the problem. However, with parity checking and
other techniques, there are tradeoffs. Time required to perform the
parity check, for example, can cause system latencies. Therefore, to
reduce latencies, a trusted register can be included into a memory system
to allow for immediate access to one piece of trusted data. By being able
to read one piece of trusted data, the system can overlap the parity
checking and delivery of a location of data with the reading of the next
location of data from the memory array. Hence, a full cycle of latency
can be eliminated without the reduction of the clock frequency.