Creating RAM faults

The paper at

formatting link
might be of interest to you. They talk about several possibilities and they used one of them.

Reply to
A. Mock
Loading thread data ...

Colin Paul Gloster claimed in news:er1tk2$ipf$ snipped-for-privacy@newsserver.cilea.it :"[..]

A cheap way to access a radiation source for Single Event Effects is by being nice to a hospital's staff and asking for permission to subject your hardware to an x-ray machine."

Vladimir Vassilevsky responded in

news:T1%Ah.14920$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr11.news.prodigy.net :"[..]

Have you ever tried to apply X-rays to a semiconductor device? BTW, I did. And here is what happens:

Up to some critical exposure, everything looks normal. After the threshold, there is a massive permanent damage.

[..]"

In November 2004, Stephen Back Ander's son said that his company, Omnisys Instruments, used a hospital's Cobalt

60 source of radiation - which was nominally used for treating cancer or something - "for a small amount of money" to check radiation effects on electronics which were successfully put in a spacecraft which were not simply destroyed after reaching some "threshold".

Colin Paul Gloster claimed in news:er1tk2$ipf$ snipped-for-privacy@newsserver.cilea.it :"Brendan mentioned desktops, but if a laptop or notebook would be acceptable, the chances of memory being disruptively zapped by neutrons is significantly higher in an airplane than at sealevel or at the altitudes of spacecraft."

Vladimir Vassilevsky responded in

news:T1%Ah.14920$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr11.news.prodigy.net :"Will you please separate your groundless speculations from what you really know."

From Alan C. Tribble, "The Space Environment: Implications for Spacecraft Design", revised and expanded edition, 2003, Princeton University Press :"[..]

5 The Radiation Environment and Its Effects [..] 5.2.4 Atmospheric Neutrons Although atmospheric effects are clearly not a concern for orbiting spacecraft, a brief discussion of atmospheric radiation is warranted. When SPEs and GCRs strike the Earth's atmosphere, they create a cascade of en- 6 ergetic particles. Most of the particles created in this cascade have charge and interact very rapidly with other atmospheric constituents. However, some of the particles generated in the cascade are neutrons. As we will see, neutrons do not interact effectively with matter. Consequently, they travel for very long distances. The atmospheric neutron environment (fig. 5.10) may pose problems for spacecraft during launch, but more usually it is high- flying, high latitude aircraft that must worry about the effects of these neu- 7 trons. (Note that due to problems in measuring absolute numbers of neu- trons accurately, relative values are usually shown.) [..] 5.7.2 Bibliography [..]
  1. Normand, E., and Baker, T. J., "Altitude and Latitude Variations in Avionics SEU and Atmospheric Neutron Flux," "IEEE Tns. Nuc. Sci.", 40, no. 6, pp. 1484-1490 (December 1993). [..]"
Reply to
Colin Paul Gloster

... snip ...

He is simply confusing cosmic rays with neutrons."

I thank CBFalconer for defending me, but actually I was not confusing cosmic rays with neutrons. Cosmic rays do disruptively zap memories at sealevel and on spacecraft. Neutrons do not zap memories at those altitudes and I was writing about aircraft, and some airplanes' locations are places where neutrons can zap memories.

Please read these posts from me in which I provided more detail re memory problems caused by neutrons as opposed to cosmic rays: news:er45r0$uc3$ snipped-for-privacy@newsserver.cilea.it and news:er28ko$lj1$ snipped-for-privacy@newsserver.cilea.it

It is certa " The cosmics tend to generate free neutrons, and other things. They are not especially likely to cause permanent chip damage, but will cause faults. That is one reason to insist on ECC memory."

This is true.

"Ask your library for "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. Very popular in my younger days. Then read it."

Why should one read it?

Thanks, Colin Paul Gloster

Reply to
Colin Paul Gloster

CBFalconer posted:

"Colin Paul Gloster wrote: [..]

BTW, your quoting technique is completely non-standard, [..] "A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much." -- Francis Crick, co-discover of DNA "There is nothing more amazing than stupidity in action." -- Thomas Matthews"

No, my quot " and confuses most quote handling software."

Alas, coloring software is often not written to correctly distinguish between direct quotations and new text in English, though as English does not even need quotation marks this is not a tractable problem in the general case anyway.

Reply to
Colin Paul Gloster

... which compares to the kind of particle accelerator I was talking about like a blind man throwing rocks does to a high-end sniper rifle.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

... and which also is a completely different type of source than the X-Ray machine you were talking about earlier. Cobalt-60 gamma rays are up to two orders of magnitude higher in energy than your usual X-Ray machine will produce.

Cobalt-60 is primarily beta radiator, with gamma radiation as a side effect.

Reply to
Hans-Bernhard Bröker

A Van de Graaf can be very precise. 50 years ago I worked at Chalk River with a 5 Mev one, (which could only reach about 3 Mev). The selection/focusing magnets were controlled by a nuclear resonance mechanism. Nobody wore watches in the machine room, because of the magnetic fields. We bombarded things and looked for resonances. Later it was replaced by a dual unit, so the ion source and the target were both at ground potential. The trick is to have an ionization reversal mechanism at the high potential. This is the basic configuration of the Yale accellerator.

--
 
 
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
CBFalconer

Books are not Usenet posts. The quoting conventions are not the same.

Here are some references to help you to improve the quality of your replies in Usenet newsgroups:

--------------------------------------------------------

"When thou enter a city, abide by its customs." -The Talmud

The advantages of usenet's quoting conventions

formatting link

Quoting Style in Newsgroup Postings

formatting link

How do I quote correctly in usenet?

formatting link

Common Mistakes in Usenet Postings and How to Avoid Them

formatting link

How To Followup A Post On Netnews Properly

formatting link

Reply to
Guy Macon

1 - Find a place that sells RAM on the Internet ( or at the local computer show). 2 - call and ask to buy some rejects.

This will give you know failures. Random stuff is unrepeatable. Not that good for code tests.

Reply to
Neil

In news:er5799$uof$03$ snipped-for-privacy@news.t-online.com timestamped Fri, 16 Feb 2007

22:25:14 +0100, Hans-Bernhard Broeker posted: "> In November 2004, Stephen Back Ander's son

... and which also is a completely different type of source than the X-Ray machine you were talking about earlier. Cobalt-60 gamma rays are up to two orders of magnitude higher in energy than your usual X-Ray machine will produce.

Cobalt-60 is primarily beta radiator, with gamma radiation as a side effect."

Hello,

I do not have any confidence to the contrary, so I do not challenge your assertion.

Regards, C. P. G.

Reply to
Colin Paul Gloster

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.