Caches are most vulnerable to the transient errors. It is important to prevent transient errors and provide a correction mechanism for hardware circuits. To prevent transient errors, cache memories employ error protection mechanisms, such as parity codes and single-bit error correction and double-bit error detection codes. These schemes are not efficient in terms of area overhead and error protection coverage. So another method is proposed to exploit same tag bits to improve error protection

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... ability of the tag bits in the caches. When an error is detected in the tag bits, the same tag bit information is used to recover from the error in the tag bits. The proposed scheme has small area, energy, and efficient error protection. To improve the energy efficiency of data caches in embedded processors a new cache design technique, referred to as early tag access (ETA) cache is designed. Technique performs ETAs to determine the destination ways of memory instructions before the actual cache accesses. It, thus, enables only the destination way to be accessed if a hit occurs during the ETA. Compared with the existing cache design techniques, the ETA cache is more effective in energy reduction while maintaining better performance.