Safer Chips

Amidst the current financial difficulties, it was good to see the announcement this week of a new £11 million investment at the local ISIS pulsed neutron source at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. This is for a facility called "Chipir", which will investigate how to protect silicon microchips in electronic circuits from cosmic rays. This is particularly relevant to safety critical systems like in aircraft, which fly at altitude and are more susceptible to cosmic radiation. However, chips are found everywhere these days and we now all rely on them for everyday life ... so I am sure this work will be relevant to many areas. I was particulary interested to see the story here, which refers to a voting machine being disrupted by cosmic radiation in Belgium in 2003 and giving a candidate an extra 4096 votes!

I assume the Science Minister,David Willets, chose to coincide his local announcement and visit to ISIS with National Science and Engineering Week - see here.