Chips

[pederito1]

Can they really mend themselves already? I have two very modern pieces, a kettle and a satellite receiver that both, though not at the same time recently became completely unresponsive at the end of a day. Yet on the next morning were working normally again, neither was overheated.

[Suff]

Moisture is another issue. It will short them out when it's there but they will work when it's gone. The more intelligent they are, the more likely moisture will cause a problem.

I have a 4GB memory stick which went through the washing machine on a 90c wash. It's still working since I dried it out.

[Aggers]

Is it not a fact that electronic gadgets which are not working correctly can sometimes be made to resume normal activities
simply my switching the mains switch off, and then back on again after a few seconds? I have done this many times.

Could that possibly the answer in this case?

[Suff]

It depends on the gadget. If the gadget is running in software, then it's possible to fix and reset it by restarting it. However if the gadget is entirely hard wired, then it will never fix with a restart because the physical components are broken.

Of course most devices now load a soft "in memory" environment when they start. Switching them off and on again loads a fresh "soft" environment from the hardware and they usually work. These devices are sort of a half way house. It's like your PC BIOS, this is a program which is written (burned), to the BIOS chip and is loaded each time the computer starts. Once it's loaded into memory, it then goes about launching the computer. However, on restart, it is always exactly the same BIOS which is loaded.

There is a big difference between soft and hard faults. Software faults are entirely down to the programmer and how the program deals with problems. For instance Windows will try to clean itself up, report errors and allow the user to resolve issues. But Windows is tens of millions of lines of code and, normally, 5-10 years between major releases. You can be assured that the software in your DVD or BlueRay player is nothing like as large or as robust or as able to fix problems when it's running.

It is a very complex world. But, when you come down to it, the world is made up of lots of very simple things. It is quite hard, nowadays, to work out what is entirely hardware and what is software in even the simplest of devices. The advent of portable Linux and Java runtimes has spawned a whole world of new "software" devices which would probably have been entirely hardware before. For instance I was at the society of model and experimental engineers for one of their weekend meets and the person responsible for their IT solutions was telling me their tools, even for tiny automation chips, are now moving from simple assembler programs to Linux and Java. I know that' makes little sense to someone outside IT, but put it like this. For an electronic rev counter that is like taking a fleet of busses to move one person, one mile, instead of using a bicycle.

[Workingman]

Don't forget that a lot of microelectronic "fuses" are self-healing in that they will "blow" when conditions are outside working parameters, then reconnect - a bit like a thermostat, but not quite. They are also very susceptible to ambient conditions such as relative humidity and temperature.

A dry joint might also be a problem.