Cosmic rays are those perky particles blasting from outer space through the atmosphere of the Earth. And they’re claimed to be the major contributor to cause instability within electronic devices that built with super tiny chips.
Now, Intel has patented the concept to build an on-chip detector of the cosmic rays. Hoping making use the cosmic detector on electronic gadgets will help to reduce the interference that cosmic rays bring to electronic components.
Having the cosmic ray detector on board, we’ll have get to have electronic devices with better stability. In fact, this step is a great move by Intel to tackle the cosmic ray interference that adds many errors of precision in today’s electronic devices.
via [Engadget]
March 9th, 2008 at 3:57 am
very interesting .. hard for the brain to digest
March 9th, 2008 at 4:05 am
It isn’t hard at all man
Just we on Earth are getting bombarded by those energetic particles from outerspace everyday, which are called cosmic rays.
And scientists have proven that these rays will have some interference to electronic chips. In order to detect and carry out the corrective action to prevent this interference on electronic devices.
Intel is gonna work on a on-chip detector for the cosmic rays. And from that on a more sophisticated chip or electronic component for shielding or correcting the errors caused by the interference could be developed and embed in most gadgets to enhance stability or protect from the cosmic ray interference
March 21st, 2008 at 5:13 am
Interseting but will hardly make a difference. Some 99.999% of all ‘instability’ problems in todays electronic devices is due to sloppy software that the chips are running rather than interference from csomic rays, or any other hardware related issue for that matter.
Will probably be a good marketing thing to say that a device is protected against cosmic rays though I don;t think it will make the devices work any better.
It could however be very useful in life critical electronics, such as avionics or medical apparatus as those usually have much better written software and a significant proportion of failures there could perhaps be attributable to cosmic rays.