Intel Patents On-Chip Cosmic Ray Detectors

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."

Comments

ECC Memory not good enough?

[beefsprocket]

Cosmic ray detector certainly makes for better marketing hype than ECC.

Why don't they...

[sokoban]

... Just mount the chips in a vertical fashion. I work in an X-ray crystallography lab and we have a large format CCD detector. It's maybe about half a foot in diameter, but because it is mounted vertically, I see a cosmic ray streak maybe once every 200 or so 40 second exposures. Compare that to a cosmic ray detector of roughly the same size which is mounted horizontally in the other side of the building. It's counting cosmic rays almost constantly.

Re:Mainframes allegedly already do this

[SeekerDarksteel]

it seems painfully inefficient to 'redo' stuff that doesn't seem to be wrong just because a cosmic ray was detected.

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.