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To: stevedhu who wrote (18012)	6/4/1998 5:18:00 PM
From: Steve Woas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 31646

C.K. Houston mentioned by Harlan Smith on the newsgroup comp.software.year-2000: " So to sum it up, Lets concede that the ES has 100 > chips, only 3 are possible candidates for y2k issues. to say that all 100 > chips must be checked is erroneous. and misleading. So, 300 chips are a > lot easier to check than 10,000 and wouldn't you feel silly trying to test > an OR GATE. or an OP AMP, or an optical isolator. Agreeing with what you have said. Indeed the problem is thoroughly bad enough, without inflating it to grotesque proportions. I don't regard this inflation as "hype" however it is just miscommunication propagated by non-technical persons such as C.K.Houston. She has but together an excellent set of embedded system links, but I'm not sure she understands or even claims to understand their contents, whether factual or not. I will also mention that it is the misnomer "embedded chip problem" erreneously substituted for "embedded systems problem" that creates a lot of this condition. The problem is always a software problem and the software for an embedded system may or may not be resident on a ROM, PROM, EPROM, EEPROM or some other kind of chip. The problem will be maniftested at the "embedded systems" level and testing at that level must occur, to confirm remediation, if nothing else. In general, one will not go through a system looking for "bad chips". The chips containing non-compliant software will usually be detected by means of system testing. In some cases, for repetitive use of a single design, a fix may be generated to produce a replacement chip design that can be repetitively applied to the repair of a large number of individual systems of common design. I gather that such a problem(s?) has been identified for the Tomahawk missile. Now the limitation for fixing those missilies seems to be a lack of skilled repair personnel that are qualified to effect the repair on the large number of missiles. But the real tyranny of the "embedded systems" problem is the huge number of unique designs in the commercial world, necessiating an extremely large number of unique "embedded systems" tests." Harlan