Hydrogen atoms fly off and cause failures. But if you replace it with deuterium, you can get up to a 20-year lifetime improvement for the transistors. Along with shrinking transistor sizes, researchers say that low voltages are causing headaches too. Iyer noted that the subtle impact of decreased voltage levels is still not well-understood, and others agreed. Today, they're more caused by bringing down voltage levels.
Signal changes are shallow so noise is a problem.
Since end users don't care whether the problem is in hardware or software, the Illinois program tries to address both. If you do a retry, that means you're using temporal redundancy. Interaction between industry and academia to get a grip on these problems is moving forward. They found that introducing a fault on one load sometimes propagated to another load, and the second or third load caused the system to crash. The research gave us a way to hold the area of containment so the faults can't propagate.