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Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight

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Re: Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight

#7
I’d really, really like to know what microcontroller family this was found on. Assuming that this is a safety processor (lockstep, ECC, etc) it suggests that ECC was insufficient for the level of bit flips they’re seeing — and if the concern is data corruption, not unintended restart, it means it’s enough flips in one word to be undetectable. The environment they’re operating in isn’t that different from everyone else, so unless they ate some margin elsewhere (bad voltage corner or something), this can definitely be relevant to others. Also would be interesting to know if it’s NVM or SRAM that’s effected.

Re: Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight

#9
post #6
post #5

Solar radiation like solar wind, or sunlight? They don’t say.

“Analysis of a recent event” I presume they mean a Coronal Mass Ejection.

I feel like the event was something that happened to a plane. That said, I wouldn't think sunlight would be penetrating to the chips running the plane.

Re: Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight

#10
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Analysis of a recent event” I presume they mean a Coronal Mass Ejection.

I feel like the event was something that happened to a plane. That said, I wouldn't think sunlight would be penetrating to the chips running the plane.

Gamma rays penetrate everything and have definitely been known to disrupt computer circuits.
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