CRITICAL aircraft control systemsnot to mention office computerscould inexplicably fail unless the makers of the next generation of microchips take account of a growing menace: background radiation.
Electronics engineers warn that the transistors in microchips are becoming so small that background radiation could corrupt the data they hold. That means data could be lost and programs might crashwith potentially disastrous results.
Engineers from Texas Instruments and Intel in the US and STMicroelectronics in France sounded the alarm at the International Test Conference in Washington DC last month. They warn that natural emissions of alpha particles and neutrons are increasingly likely to corrupt chunks of data in the coming generations of memory and microprocessor chips.
Most PCs now in the shops are powered by microchips in which the transistors are between 330 and 250 nanometres across (see "Crashing the barriers", p 42). Radiation-induced failures are rare, and any that do ...
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