By What causes soft memory errors?
A soft error is caused mainly by radiation rays. When particles included in the radiation rays clash with a semiconductor, charged particles are generated within the semiconductor. The charged particles distort the data contained in the memory cells to generate a soft error.
What is a soft fault?
Soft is when the data being sought is actually in memory, but can’t be found by address. These can quickly be corrected and the data retrieved without paging to disk. Hard faults are when the data being sought is not in memory at all and forces a retrieval from physical storage before going into memory.
What errors occur in cosmic rays?
Cosmic-ray spallations in the atmosphere produce high energy neutrons, and these neutrons wake up an upset of bits on memory devices. This phenomenon is called’soft error’or ‘single-event upset.
What is firm error?
An error in a memory element is considered soft because it corrupts the data. This same type of radiation induced error in an FPGA is a “firm” error, because it is not just a transient data error. When a firm error occurs, the data is not corrupted; it is the device’s configuration or “personality” that is affected.
What is difference between hard failure and soft error?
In this context hard failures are errors that occur through process defects and/or circuit bugs – hard failures are repeatable with the correct sequence of actions within the microcontroller. Soft errors occur through no failure of the circuit or defect but due to an external source that causes the data to change.
How often do soft errors occur?
Soft Errors in Electronic Memory – A White Paper – A good summary paper with many references – Tezzaron January 2004. Concludes that 1000–5000 FIT per Mbit (0.2–1 error per day per Gbyte) is a typical DRAM soft error rate. Evaluation of LSI Soft Errors Induced by Terrestrial Cosmic rays and Alpha Particles – H.
What is the difference between a soft failure and a hard failure?
How do you reduce hard faults per second?
In general, the more RAM you have, the fewer hard faults per second you should see. Some users have reportedly been able to reduce the hard faults per second count by disabling and re-enabling the pagefile. sys file. If you want to give it a go, please follow our in-depth article (disable pagefile).
What is a soft error rate?
Soft error rate (SER) is the rate at which a device or system encounters or is predicted to encounter soft errors. It is typically expressed as either the number of failures-in-time (FIT) or mean time between failures (MTBF).
What causes firm error in FPGA?
Programmable logic devices based on SRAM technology are susceptible to single-event errors where alpha and neutron radiation causes loss of configuration data. The loss of the underlying FPGA configuration is called a “firm error”, and it will remain until detected and corrected.
What is hard failure and soft failure?
What is soft error rate?