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To: Amy J who wrote (83769)6/18/1999 3:32:00 AM
From: Paul Engel  Read Replies (1) of 186894
 
Amy - Re: "Do Silicon-on-Insulator structures exist today? If not, how frequent does a corruption occur from charge collection from electron-hole pairs? "

Actually, IBM claims they are within a few months of bringing SOI CPUs - PowerPCs - into production.

Many years ago, several companies were working on Silicon-On-Saphire (SOS) - an exotic technology that employed a very thin film of Epitaxial Silicon grown on a Sapphire substrate.

Inselek - a company in New Jersey - was in production at one point. HP and Intel also has SOS programs in development during the lates 70's and early 80's but technology problems scuttled these along with the inexorable march of Bulk Silicon CMOS technology.

Re: "how frequent does a corruption occur from charge collection from electron-hole pairs? "

Now that depends on many things - including WHERE THE SYSTEM is !

Most DRAM manufacturers and system manufacturers have this problem well under control - but they have had to go to EXTREME measures - such as using 3 dimensional TRENCH capacitors for the storage node = or MULTIPLE STACKED Polysilicon Storage gates - not to mention VERY VERY this gate oxides - all in the attempt to ADD capacitance to the storage node.

Q = CV, and raising the capacitance, C< increases the charge, Q, that is required to "flip" a bit. V is the voltage applied across the storage capacitor electrode/gate.

Now the kicker - in outer space, cosmic radiation that can penetrate essentially everything - has been shown to cause soft errors in memory chips and most likely will be one of the first "trip-points" for soft-error induced failures in logic devices such as microprocessors.

Paul
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