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Re: Veritasium video on the frequency of bit flips

On Thu, Sep 2, 2021, at 4:00 PM, Dianne Skoll wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Sep 2021 15:39:37 -0400
> "Ian! D. Allen" <idallen [ at ] idallen [ dot ] ca> wrote:
> 
> > At 17m53s: "On one five-day [Space Shuttle Mission] there were 161
> > separate bit flips."
> 
> > Okay, maybe we *do* need ECC RAM.
> 
> Certainly on the space shuttle.  Probably on important servers on Earth.
> 
> I wonder about flash memory.  As flash memory cells shrink, could a cosmic
> ray flip the charge on the floating gate?  And if so, does flash have the
> equivalent of ECC?

yeah flash has the same problem. last time I worked with it (8 years ago) it was either BCH based ECC in software or hardware. (Some flash controllers have a controller with BCH in hardware)

I tried running a machine with a buggy BCH implementation and it would fail to boot in under a day and took about 1 month to debug -- which is how I know this.

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