Intel Patents On-Chip Cosmic Ray Detectors 100
holy_calamity writes "Intel has been awarded a patent for building cosmic ray detectors into chips, to guard against soft errors where a high energy particle from space changes a value in a circuit. It's a problem that largely only affects RAM. As component sizes shrink futher, "this problem is projected to become a major limiter of computer reliability in the next decade", says the patent. Intel's solution is to build in a detector that responds to cosmic errors by repeating the latest operation, reloading previous instructions, or rolling back to a previous state. You can also read the full patent."
ECC Memory not good enough? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't they... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Networking possibilities for science? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mainframes allegedly already do this (Score:4, Insightful)
1) The likelihood of a cosmic ray is ridiculously small. So small in fact that the cost of rewinding progress when they are detected would be completely unnoticeable.
2) We *do* have the ability to package CPUs such that they are protected by CPUs. The problem is that the packages are so large and expensive that no one would buy them given the current probability of soft errors.
So the solution is most definitely NOT to stop shrinking transistors. Even in 10 process technology generations, the mean time to a soft error actually affecting a bit on a CPU is something like 1 million hours. Never mind whether or not that particular soft error is critical.
Re:How? (Score:2, Insightful)
As the GP said, there is no way of knowing wheter a cosmic ray passed through you or not. The cosmic ray could easily just smash your bit to a new, random state and pass happily unhindered through the actual detector thingy. Only way to improve the situation would be to build a large detector volume (at least a couple cm^3).