RAM recovery

I was pleased that there were people who were able and willing to advise me on this matter, and I would welcome if anyone else would like to comment on this topic

BlindSeeker said:

@Bruce - I doubt this will play out much more Mate. I've been in computing hardware since the punch card days and have only seen hardware with the high energy load needed in some of the super computer setups.. Some of those beasts had their RAM cooled with cryo fluids.

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Pyro said:

I've never experienced it even in heavy computing. I think in any home-computer tasks you will be more than okay and do not have to worry about ram cooling as long as there is adequate case cooling.

This thread seems to keep going in circles, so I'm going to generalize and say all of those articles are based on either deliberate attempts to create said problem or scenarios where the electronics are being pushed far past whatever thresholds and limits they may have.

If this was a common issue consumer-devices suffered from there would be far more information about it from people experiencing it, not just theoretical scenarios.

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Bruce said:

I'll step back with a final say....

probably because this is not a real-world problem and has never been seen in home, office, or industry computing, it just isn't something to get worked up about.

super computers working out Pi to the trillionth place - maybe.
winning the race to build a machine with the most FLOPS - OK. (actually achieved by Frontier last month, breaking the exascale barrier)

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I just remembered hearing about the HC effect in relation to EEPROM, specifically:

Hot carrier injection (HCI) is a phenomenon in solid-state electronic devices where an electron or a “hole” gains sufficient kinetic energy to overcome a potential barrier necessary to break an interface state. The term "hot" refers to the effective temperature used to model carrier density, not to the overall temperature of the device. Since the charge carriers can become trapped in the gate dielectric of a MOS transistor, the switching characteristics of the transistor can be permanently changed. Hot-carrier injection is one of the mechanisms that adversely affects the reliability of semiconductors of solid-state devices.[1]



HCI and NOR flash memory cells
HCI is the basis of operation for a number of non-volatile memory technologies such as EPROM cells. As soon as the potential detrimental influence of HC injection on the circuit reliability was recognized, several fabrication strategies were devised to reduce it without compromising the circuit performance.

NOR flash memory exploits the principle of hot carriers injection by deliberately injecting carriers across the gate oxide to charge the floating gate. This charge alters the MOS transistor threshold voltage to represent a logic '0' state. An uncharged floating gate represents a '1' state. Erasing the NOR Flash memory cell removes stored charge through the process of Fowler–Nordheim tunneling.

Because of the damage to the oxide caused by normal NOR Flash operation, HCI damage is one of the factors that cause the number of write-erase cycles to be limited. Because the ability to hold charge and the formation of damage traps in the oxide affects the ability to have distinct '1' and '0' charge states, HCI damage results in the closing of the non-volatile memory logic margin window over time. The number of write-erase cycles at which '1' and '0' can no longer be distinguished defines the endurance of a non-volatile memory.


From this I conclude that Hot electrons and Hot-carrier injections can also be in low-powered devices, including RAM, because EEPROM is there too.

What do you think about it?