{"id":551210,"date":"2007-01-05T10:40:58","date_gmt":"2007-01-05T10:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress\/technology\/551210-cosmic-rays-test-new-microcircuits.html"},"modified":"2007-01-05T10:40:58","modified_gmt":"2007-01-05T10:40:58","slug":"cosmic-rays-test-new-microcircuits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/technology\/551210-cosmic-rays-test-new-microcircuits.html","title":{"rendered":"Cosmic rays test new microcircuits"},"content":{"rendered":"

The machine had been thoroughly tested and deemed perfect. <\/font><\/p>\n

So what went wrong? <\/font><\/p>\n

The answer was, literally, a strike from the heavens. <\/font><\/p>\n

Technicians pointed the finger of blame at cosmic rays – particles that zip across the cosmos at huge speed and, while rightly ignored by humans as a health concern, can wreak havoc with\u00a0 highly sensitive microelectronic circuits. <\/font><\/p>\n

"The phenomenon has been known for a long time by aerospace experts but, as components become more and more miniaturised, almost any electronic equipment these days is at risk," says French scientist Jean-Luc Autran. <\/font><\/p>\n

When cosmic particles reach Earth, they usually collide with molecules in the upper atmosphere, and the debris then whacks into other atoms until it is safely smashed. <\/font><\/p>\n

Only a tiny fraction of the original particles that perpetually bombard our planet ever reaches Earth’s surface. <\/font><\/p>\n

Even so, a whizzing neutron can be lethal to information technology. <\/font><\/p>\n

When it hits an electronic component, it unleashes a parasitic electrical discharge. <\/font><\/p>\n

"In the past, when circuits were big and clunky, this was no big deal," says Autran of the L2MP laboratory at the University of Provence, Marseille. <\/font><\/p>\n

"But now, more and more circuits are being crammed into chips." <\/font><\/p>\n

As a result, the electrical discharge can be as powerful or even greater than the charge used to store the binary code on the chip. <\/font><\/p>\n

"If the zero or one which is knocked out by the discharge is part of a logic code, the consequences can be disastrous," says Autran. <\/font><\/p>\n

Altitude adds to vulnerability. <\/font><\/p>\n

At sea level, one square centimetre (0.155 of a square inch) is hit by 10 neutrons every hour; for an airliner cruising altitude, the tally is a thousand times higher. <\/font><\/p>\n

"Take a laptop which runs perfectly and hop on a transatlantic flight," says Autran. <\/font><\/p>\n

"There is a high risk that it will jam up once during the trip and you have to reboot it." <\/font><\/p>\n

Some particles are especially invasive, such as high energy neutrons, which can pass through a shield of armour plate or reinforced concrete. <\/font><\/p>\n

For years, airliner and spacecraft engineers have tackled the problem by installing backup circuitry. <\/font><\/p>\n

But this costly solution is hardly feasible in small, cheap consumer gadgets. <\/font><\/p>\n

This is where Autran comes in. <\/font><\/p>\n

His lab, and STMicroelectronics, a Franco-Italian semiconductor maker, have set up the first high altitude test bench for accurately assessing the problem. <\/font><\/p>\n

Set up in July at 2,252 metres (8,294 feet) at a cost of 1.1 million euros (1.4 million dollars) at the Plateau de Bure astronomical observatory in the French alps, the platform is testing nearly 1,300 embedded memory circuits. <\/font><\/p>\n

Each circuit houses four million memory points, which means it can store a sequence of four million zeroes and ones – a total of nearly five billion memory cells in all. <\/font><\/p>\n

The work entails checking whether any rogue galactic particle has corrupted the data – the memories are periodically checked to see whether a zero has been transformed into a one or vice versa. <\/font><\/p>\n

To get a comparison of exposures, a similar lab has been set up near sea level in Marseille and a third 550 metres (1,787 feet) underground at the former headquarters of France’s nuclear strike force on the Plateau d’Albion, about 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of that southern French city. <\/font><\/p>\n

The underground HQ, swathed in concrete and protected by rock, is deemed to be impenetrable even to high energy neutrons. <\/font><\/p>\n

The chips being studied have a circuit size of 130 nanometres (130 billionths of a metre). <\/font><\/p>\n

This size is already being surpassed in state-of-the-art circuits of 65 nanometres, where as many as four bits of information could be corrupted by a particle strike. <\/font><\/p>\n

Autran points out that the problem goes beyond mundane gadgets such as laptop computers, mobile phones and high definition TVs. <\/font><\/p>\n

Cars, high speed trains, hospital equipment, "even pacemakers," could be vulnerable to the risk from space from their dependence on\u00a0 high performance chips, he says. <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On May 18 2003, officials overseeing an election in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels, got a shock: An electronic vote counting machine declared that 4096 more people had cast their vote than the ballot slips testified. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551210"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}