New Way to Patch Defective Hardware

brunascle writes "Researchers have devised a new way to patch hardware. By treating a computer chip more like software than hardware, Josep Torrellas, a computer science professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, believes we will be able to fix defective hardware by a applying a patch, similar to the way defective software is handled. His system, dubbed Phoenix, consists of a standard semiconductor device called a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Although generally slower than their application-specific integrated circuit counterparts, FPGAs have the advantage of being able to be modified post-production. Defects found on a Phoenix-enabled chip could be resolved by downloading a patch and applying it to the hardware. Torrellas believes this would give chips a shorter time to market, saying "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market.""

Comments

So, he's discovered the FPGA?

[seanadams.com]

Don't bother reading TFA, there is no more information there than what's in the summary. Just some additional hand waving about how this enabling technology will magically detect and fix hardware bugs.

I'm sure the professor has developed _something_, but the article sure doesn't give any clue what it might be. This story is nothing more than an exceptionally poor description of what any FPGA can do.

Re:So, he's discovered the FPGA?

[alx5000]

Imagine for a moment that this guy has invented something new. Imagine, as the last line of the summary suggests, that "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market."

Sounds like the hardware version of Windows. Every user would be a beta tester. Your phone calls your friends in the middle of the night and makes strange noises? It's ok, we'll fix it soon. Meanwhile remember we were the first to offer scheduled calls for cell phones!

WTF?

[PhxBlue]

So we'd get to have these chips in PCs sooner, and in return, they'd be less reliable? No thanks. One Pentium floating-point problem was bad enough.

So from a customer viewpoint

[JanneM]

So, from a customer viewpoint, what this offers is slower, more expensive hardware that is less tested and buggier than the competitors coming down the pipeline in a month or two?

I suspect I an do without.

Oh great...

[Brandybuck]

"If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market."

Oh great, now we'll have hardware as crappy as software. I guess we'll have to get used to the new QA mantra: "If it solders, ship it!" Sigh.