The nicest use of a similar XOR trick I have seen is to eliminate dead cycles in hardware bus arbiters.

Suppose you need to multiplex between inputs A,B,C to make output D (e.g. you have a 3d block, a display engine, and a CPU all trying to access DRAM). The idea is to xor all valid inputs together.

When there is only one input this results in output=input. If all 3 are active then the output is A^B^C. The trick is that the next cycle only the granted input (say A) is removed so the output is B^C

Receivers are required to XOR two sequential values to extract the actual data. In this case (A^B^C)^(B^C)=A.

See the "NoX Router" for details and explanation of how this compares to alternative arbitration approaches: pharm.ece.wisc.edu/papers/micro2011_nox.pdf