Millennium Bug Set to Bite Embedded Chips in Myriad Home Systems
By George Avalos, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Nov. 5--The millennium bug may put the bite on more than just computers.
The digital glitch is poised to foul up billions of tiny devices that affect
everyday life.
These gizmos are called embedded chips and they are inside or attached
to scads of equipment. Telephones, valves, thermostats, smoke detectors,
traffic lights, nuclear plants, power networks, elevators, bank vaults,
factories, oil refineries and medical equipment could go haywire. More than a
few U.S. warplanes and military systems may be affected. The Mars Pathfinder
contains many of these systems.
What's more, the home is anything but immune from this strain of the
Year 2000 bug. Cars could stop running or operate erratically. Air
conditioners and heating systems could fail.
These systems could malfunction if their embedded circuits can't
determine whether it's the year 2000 or 1900.
Finding systems with embedded chips could be a monumentally difficult
task in itself. Hour by hour, day by day, embedded systems quietly perform a
task over and over. But technology officials warn that embedded systems have
been installed in a lot of places that aren't obvious.
"It's like chasing a worm through a bag of spaghetti," said George
Steinbrecher, chief information officer with Contra County. "There's a lot of
stuff to look through. I truly believe that somewhere, somehow, we will miss
something."
The potential problems are a reminder that society has come to depend
more and more on these chips, which are the tiny brains that operate a host
of devices and systems.
"Embedded chips are in everything," said Robert Hammell, a consultant
with SES West Consultants in Hartford, Conn. "If there are any time-driven
events involved, that's where you have mischief."
Should the lights go out or the telephones stop operating on Jan. 1,
2000, embedded chips could be as much a culprit as a time-confused computer
system.
"You will have rolling brownouts and blackouts in various parts of the
country," said Larry McArthur, president of San Jose-based Ascent Logic
Corp., which sells software to help companies assess their Y2K risks. "Water
suppliers and emergency communications systems may be affected."
Some skeptics believe the worries about embedded chips are overblown.
They dismiss the notion that catastrophic failures will occur because of
these tiny but pervasive devices.
"The consultants believe 20 percent of the embedded chips will fail, but
we don't see those numbers at all," said Lou Marcoccio, Year 2000 research
director with the GartnerGroup in Stamford, Conn.
Marcoccio said this problem won't cause people to get stuck in
immobilized vehicles.
"The idea that elevators will not operate, a whole bunch of automobiles
will not run, that is all garbage," Marcoccio said. "We have not found one
elevator manufacturer, out of hundreds, that will have a failure due to the
Y2K glitch."
But consultant Hammell believes GartnerGroup, which is a world-class
researcher when it comes to computers and software, may be a bit out of its
depth when analyzing embedded chips. Hammell says he recently tested
elevators in a London office building by advancing the timers to Jan. 1,
2000. "The elevator doors shut, came down to the basement, opened the doors
and everything went black," Hammell said.
Still, the embedded chip problem is anything but hopeless, although like
the rest of the Y2K problem, the solution will be time-consuming. Embedded
chips can be a set of circuits bonded to the device they control, or may
contain some software that can be reprogrammed with the correct dates.
"Companies and organizations should take a comprehensive inventory of
everything they have, establish a triage, and get to work," Hammell said.
That's what county officials in the East Bay are doing. Contra Costa,
for example, is putting its 911 systems, fire equipment, fire trucks, police
cars and hospital equipment among the top priority items that need fixing.
If the county suspects a faulty embedded chip, it would contact the
manufacturer. The county would then replace the device that contains the
chip, or upgrade the software.
Consumers also can protect themselves. Consultants say people should
undertake an inventory of their electronic devices. They should also check
the status of embedded systems inside their cars, VCRs, microwave ovens,
phones, heating systems, burglar alarms and other devices. They should
contact manufacturers to check whether the embedded system is Y2K compliant.
"People are only now just starting to scramble to fix this," Hammell
said. "People should start paying attention to what are the most critical
things that affect them."
-----
Visit HotCoco, the World Wide Web site of the Contra Costa Times, at
hotcoco.com
(c) 1998, Contra Costa Times, Calif. Distributed by Knight
Ridder/Tribune Business News. |
