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To: Saturn V who wrote (115144)	10/29/2000 6:33:15 PM
From: Tony Viola	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

ECC, first implemented for main memory because the DRAM cells could easily be flipped from a 1 to a 0 by an alpha or neutron particle. Later, when cache cells got small enough, they also became susceptible, even though they are static, which is more robust to hits than dynamic cells. ECC is not something you want to leave out of a very expensive machine like that. Tony

To: Saturn V who wrote (115144)	10/29/2000 7:29:33 PM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Cosmic rays are not emitted from the chip packaging material. They come from the Cosmos. Alpha rays which are ionizing radiation are emitted from the packaging material.

To: Saturn V who wrote (115144)	10/29/2000 7:41:43 PM
From: THE WATSONYOUTH	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

This is the old problem with memory chips - "The Soft Error Problem", known for more than twenty years. Cosmic Rays or Alpha particles emitted from trace amounts of radioactive material in chip packaging, can cause random memory bits to lose data. The most serious source of these Alpha particles is the lead in the C4 solder balls. Certain sources of lead are characterized as low Alpha lead. Perhaps, they were not using this type of source. Also, the design and stability of the SRAM cell is also a prime contributor to the problem as certain cell designs will take less collected charge to "flip". It may be the combination of the two. Clearly, they weren't doing any of their own soft error rate characterization on the SRAM chips from the supplier. Incredibly enough, things are so bad at IBM that they will be supplying Sun with the new 16MB SRAM memory chips they will be using to make these mirrored memory modules to fix the problem. THE WATSONYOUTH