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

Speaking of cosmic errors

[davidwr]

build in a detector that responds to cosmic errors by repeating the latest operation I think I detected a cosmic error in the Michigan Democratic Primary? Can I have a do-over?

Sincerely,
Barack O. and Jennifer G.