At 05:50 PM 3/6/03 -0500, Tyler Durden wrote: >On a slow day, Tim May wrote... > >"Next you'll be claiming that chips can be influenced by cosmic and >background radiation!" > >When I used to characterize DWDM systems, we'd sometimes need to test down >to a BER of 10(-14), with some vendors wanting 10(-16). (So we'd loop back a >whole bunch of OC-48s and wait a few days for an error.) >When operating under "perfect" conditions, once in a great while, with 16 or >more OC-48s, we'd occasionally see an error. This we chalked up to "cosmic >rays", which I believed, but never really confirmed.
The cosmic ray hypothesis has been criticized already. You might attribute a soft error to simple, local radioactive decay. [Hey, it worked for Tim] Background is ca. 10 uR/hr. Could be a few times higher if you have radon and don't ventilate e.g., at night. And stay out of the van Allen belts.. Errors might also be due to the random variables in your (noise, jitter, etc) models really being random, ie, eventually huge excursions. --- I'm pleased to announce we have outlawed Russia forever. We begin bombing immediately. -President Reagan (joking, unlike various sucessors)
