5 Jan
1999
5 Jan
'99
2:52 p.m.
On Wed, 6 Jan 1999, Tony Duell wrote:
The story on cosmic rays affecting memory is
well-known. It was proposed
as the reason why one of the early 4Kbit (I think) chips had a very high
error rate. It was later found (I think) that the real reason was alpha
particles from the radioactive decay of something in the (ceramic?)
package of the chip.
Gordon Moore (founder of Intel) related a story at a dinner function I
attended last November about how Intel was trying to figure out a random
fault in one of their chips (I believe it was a RAM). Finally, one
engineer suggested cosmic rays, so they enclosed a system inside an igloo
of lead bricks and the problem never occured during the time the system
was inside the igloo (several weeks).
Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com
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