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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (43167)	5/30/2000 3:18:00 AM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Carl's argument is silly! They ship RDRAM systems without ECC. If this was a "real" problem then there would only be flaky non ECC RDRAM systems. ECC is an extra charge.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (43167)	6/7/2000 7:27:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Hi Tenchusatsu; Re ECC as mask for EMI problems &c... Actually, I didn't miss your point, I just wanted to move the subject of conversation over to something more interesting. And if you found metastability calculations interesting, you may find this Ron Wilson column from the latest EE-Times also of interest: Facing metal monsters It's no secret that interconnect design is a monster casting an ominous shadow over the future of high-density ICs. As real designs move warily closer to 0.1-micron processes, more problems are appearing. First it became clear that interconnect impedance was going to be a larger issue than gate delay on critical timing paths. Then we started hearing about more subtle issues: capacitive coupling between adjacent runs, inductive coupling between closely related runs and even antenna coupling between seemingly unrelated runs. We're trying to move signals at the frequencies the RF folks use for carriers. ... The real solution may be ugly: Using buses just to manage routing complexity. But we may have to treat them as inherently unreliable channels, and use the error-correction strategies familiar to the communications and mass-storage industries. This would result in a hierarchical chip in which the most traffic-intensive blocks were linked by buses with error-correcting codes and hardware redundancy. This will make the interconnect latency between blocks much greater than the random wiring delay. In an era of almost-free transistors, the overhead to build in error correction may be less than the inefficiency of design rules that could almost eliminate signal-integrity problems. eetimes.com It sort of gives one a sense of how computers really aren't so perfect after all, doesn't it? Ah, the sweet sadness of being tied to this corporeal world of approximations and imperfections, when our brains and souls are designed for the most delightful of concepts and abstractions! -- Carl P.S. By no means am I suggesting that Ron Wilson's article is the future of high density ICs. I'm just putting this out there as an interesting concept. What is "perfection", anyway? (Warning for Rambus Fantasy Land dwellers. A link to a CMP publication included here, put on your aluminum foil underwear!!!)