This news makes me glad that I am driving a banged-up Toyota. Apparently, newer car models are more prone to the possibility of being damaged by cosmic rays (radiation consisting of energetic particles originating beyond the Earth that impinge on the its atmosphere). The reason for this is that cars of today have evolved from purely mechanical machines to highly integrated drive-by-wire electronics system.

This poses a dilemma to car manufacturers, desginers and engineers. They must continually add complex electronics to each successive model year while still maintaining high standards for quality and reliability, all while meeting the stringent demands of low-cost, high-volume production.

To solve these problems, many designers are turning to FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Array) as a flexible, low-cost solution for their next-generation automotive electronics designs.

But cars which boast of the latest technologies are in trouble because of "Neutron- induced Firm Errors" which is basically the bombardment of neutrons from space. This might sound too Star Trekkish to most (it does to me!) but it could actually happened.

When it does, it may cause the host system (your car's intricate electrical set-up) to malfunction. Looking into the future, this problem will only worsen as future deep submicron manufacturing processes will continue to create substantial challenges for designers of FPGA-based automotive electronics.

The consequences of a neutron-induced error could be severe. If a configuration bit upsets and changes state, it could change the entire functionality of the device, resulting in significant data corruption or the forwarding of spurious signals into other circuits in the system.

In extreme cases, the undetected existence for a prolonged period of a firm error can become a "hard error" and cause the destruction of the device itself or the system containing the device - a neutron-induced firm error that misroutes a signal creating an internal short is one common example of this type of problem.