As the technology moves into the nano-realm, traditional single-error-correcting, double-error-detecting (SEC-DED) codes are no longer sufficient for protecting memories against transient errors due to the increased multi-bit error rate. The well known double-errorcorrecting BCH codes and the classical decoding method for BCH codes based on Berlekamp-Massey algorithm and Chien search cannot be directly adopted to replace SEC-DED codes because of their much larger decoding latency. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical double-errorcorrecting (HDEC) code. The construction methods and the decoder architecture for the codes are described. The presented error correcting algorithm takes only 1 clock cycle to finish if no error or a single-bit error occurs. When there are multi-bit errors, the decoding latency is O(log 2 m) clock cycles for codes defined over GF (2 m ). This is much smaller than the latency for decoding BCH codes using Berlekamp Massey algorithm and Chien search, which is O(k) clock cycles -k is the number of information bits for the code and m ∼ O(log 2 k). Synthesis results show that the proposed (79, 64) HDEC code requires only 80% of the area and consumes < 70% of the power compared to the classical (78, 64) BCH code. For a large bit distortion rate (10 −3 ∼ 10 −2 ), the average decoding latency for the (79, 64) HDEC code is only 36% ∼ 60% of the latency for decoding the (78, 64) BCH code.