The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Apr. 28, 2009
Filed:
Jun. 01, 2005
Lawrence G. Votta, Jr., Menlo Park, CA (US);
Kenneth C. Gross, San Diego, CA (US);
Aleksey M. Urmanov, San Diego, CA (US);
Douglas B. Meyer, San Diego, CA (US);
Lawrence G. Votta, Jr., Menlo Park, CA (US);
Kenneth C. Gross, San Diego, CA (US);
Aleksey M. Urmanov, San Diego, CA (US);
Douglas B. Meyer, San Diego, CA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A method for use in a computer system provides a dynamic, 'self tuning' soft-error-rate-discrimination (SERD) method and apparatus. Specially designed SRAMs or other circuits are 'tuned' in a manner that gives them extreme susceptibility to cosmic neutron events (soft errors), higher than that of the “regular” SRAM components, memory modules or other components in the computer system. One such specially designed SRAM is deployed per server. An interface algorithm continuously sends read/write traffic to the special SRAM to infer the soft error rate (SER), which is directly proportional to cosmic neutron flux. The inferred cosmic neutron flux rate is employed in a Poisson SPRT algorithmic approach that dynamically compensates the soft error discrimination sensitivity in accordance with the instantaneous neutron flux for all of the regular SRAM components in the server.