- "There is no such thing as digital circuitry. There is only analog circuitry driven to extremes." Digital is a pretty leaky abstraction. You can't safely ignore the physical world. In particular, be wary of your digital parts changing into other parts (or new "parts" appearing out of the blue) thanks to physics.
- There's so much that can go wrong. I'm in awe of people working on life-critical systems, and of challenges they deal with.
- What the fuck is going on with IC durability? The presentation quotes a text from 2013, which says "Commercial semiconductor road maps show component reliability timescales are being reduced to 5–7 years, more closely aligning with commercial product life cycles of 2–3 years." I.e. if your device has modern electronics on-board, it already won't last long because semiconductor devices themselves are expected to naturally fail after few years. This makes me really sad about the state of our technological civilization.
- Don't ignore specs you don't fully, 100% honest-to-god understand! Slide 38 is a damning enough description by itself. I'd add that this also applies to bureaucracies and laws - just because you think some rule is stupid, doesn't mean it is. "Move fast and break things" approach has no place where lives (or livelihoods) can be affected.
- Even adding a node to a linked list isn't a trivial thing, and has many places in which you can screw it up. This highlights just how much acummulated complexity we're dealing with here.
- Life always finds a way... to grow in your electronics and break it.
Far as IC's, Ive been reading on their failures for some time. As non-HW person, it looks like the physics of IC reliability get worse every time they shrink to a lower node. Variability of what each component does increases. The analog may drift more since I saw one group using digital cells to keep it accurate at 90nm. I keep seeing attempts to do magic at the gate or synthesis levels to counter a bunch of this. They already do to a large degree which is why they last 2-3 years in first place instead of breaking immediately.
So, it looks like they'd spend a lot extra with effects on performance/watts/cost to make them last for NASA lengths of time. Those same companies are incentivized to sell new chips regularly in a price-competitive market. So, no reason for them to do aforementioned work since it's just throwing away money.
Again, just overview of a non-HW guy that reads a lot of HW industry's publications. HW people correct anything I missed please.
To extremely simplify it, we're effectively making our lightbulbs smaller and expecting the same brightness out of them. We could keep a bulb going for a century, but it's not going to light as well as we expect.
Few lessons I took from it:
- "There is no such thing as digital circuitry. There is only analog circuitry driven to extremes." Digital is a pretty leaky abstraction. You can't safely ignore the physical world. In particular, be wary of your digital parts changing into other parts (or new "parts" appearing out of the blue) thanks to physics.
- There's so much that can go wrong. I'm in awe of people working on life-critical systems, and of challenges they deal with.
- What the fuck is going on with IC durability? The presentation quotes a text from 2013, which says "Commercial semiconductor road maps show component reliability timescales are being reduced to 5–7 years, more closely aligning with commercial product life cycles of 2–3 years." I.e. if your device has modern electronics on-board, it already won't last long because semiconductor devices themselves are expected to naturally fail after few years. This makes me really sad about the state of our technological civilization.
- Don't ignore specs you don't fully, 100% honest-to-god understand! Slide 38 is a damning enough description by itself. I'd add that this also applies to bureaucracies and laws - just because you think some rule is stupid, doesn't mean it is. "Move fast and break things" approach has no place where lives (or livelihoods) can be affected.
- Even adding a node to a linked list isn't a trivial thing, and has many places in which you can screw it up. This highlights just how much acummulated complexity we're dealing with here.
- Life always finds a way... to grow in your electronics and break it.