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Veritasium 15 May 2026 40 here now

How Alpha Particles Can Break Computer Chips

In the 1970s, Intel couldn't work out what was damaging the DRAM on their microchips.

The cause turned out to be the ceramic that the chip was encased in. It was secretly flipping 1s to 0s.

But how?

For You

Because of what you watch

Comments (20)

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Lived it: I was at Texas Instruments in 1980 and one of my tasks was to develop an alpha-particle shield for DRAMs.
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Good on intel for identifying the problem and fixing it all the way back then!
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The best part about getting a Veritasium notification is you know the video is guranteed to be interesting and worth your time, plus you get to learn stuff too!
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Let’s zoom in to the town of Green River, UT when talking about Colorado! Great work!
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This short is excellent. Thanks. Earlier, I had watched the longer version and it was superb.
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@jn1ty From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 8
Not to mention the people probably drank that water.
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And 40 years later, radiation caused Mario to teleport vertically live on stream in Super Mario 64.
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@beatle1987 From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 128
I work in aviation. This forms a large part of the safety design of the aircraft as the operating altitude makes high energy cosmic rays more likely. Luckily we can mitigate it through software such as storing multiple copies of data (usually triplicate) in different physical areas of memory. It has to be different physical areas of memory, because as memory gets smaller, the likelihood of multiple bit flips from one ray increases.
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@steveo7006 From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 17
Radiation is the real reason why data centers in space are impractical.
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@donc-m4900 From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 420
ECC in 3, 2, 0
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@kpop469 From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 9
That’s some high tech engineering.. Kudos to those who found out the problem
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A proper Short. Thank you.
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Can't believe I'm old enough to recall this problem in the industry. Actually, there were more problems during that period as well. One such, popped up slightly later called "Ghost capacitance" (but on a PCB). When I created a failure analysis team, we discovered random PCBs that were affected, that took what seemed like forever to find. Those were some fun times though. 🕺💃😊🤘
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This fear of the short by Veritasium being ended abruptly was inside me the whole video.
Thank God they ended it
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@RashaKahn From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 114
Ok, so we need uranium bullets when AI decides to take over.
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@mr50EEE From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 4700
HE HAS RAM GET HIM
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@ItsDIYLife From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 693
Mad respect for the geniuses at Intel researchers Timothy C. May and M.H. Woods who determined the cause of the problem.
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Lets take a moment to appreciate that this short actually finished what it was trying to say and wasn't clickbait, with no dependence on video context or resolution. Thanks, Veritasium!
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@davoc5140 From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 2100
That deserves a standing ovation for the engineers who found that error .. incredible
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@AFpaleoCon From YouTube ↗ 22 May 2026 8500
As an engineer my heart and soul goes out to whatever poor dudes had to debug that problem.