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To: John Walliker who wrote (134492)	5/9/2001 11:37:53 AM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 186894

John, Experiments were done on single chips that were bombarded from an Alpha source while being continuously tested on an Advantest machine. When the radiation was turned on, the chips failed. Turn it off, they didn't fail. >>Presumably this was done with the package opened, as alpha particles do not penetrate very far? I believe what you say is true. Some more history of the thing: after it was concluded that external radiation was causing soft errors, a big effort was made to shield the silicon, by the packaging, to keep particles out. As you say, that didn't take a whole lot of shielding. A piece of paper could stop most of them. The problem still didn't go away, however, and next, it was determined that the packaging material itself was emitting particles and causing errors. Big effort then was expended to use packaging material that didn't have much half life activity going on, etc. Thinking about Sun some more, all this Alpha and other radiation research was going on when Sun was "just a workstation company." In other words, they weren't into the big, expensive, high availability requirement computers yet. They got into them by buying the rights (or the whole design) to build what turned into the UE1000, etc., series from Cray Research. So, I guess an excuse for Sun could be that they weren't the developers of their own flagship product, that ultimately got all the flak for the no-ECC on the cache thing. Blame Cray. Somebody tell Scotty. Tony