by Barbara Aichinger | Jan 28, 2020 | Data Center, DDR4 Memory, Medical Device Safety
In our Services department we see all sorts of systems, network switches, routers, and medical devices, etc. They all share a common theme….the DDR Memory does not work right. The engineers sending us these problem systems are frustrated and we often hear ‘we started getting failures in the field after having it work for years’ or ‘the applications now can’t tolerate any failures’. We even get the occasional ‘this memory stick fails but this one does not, can you tell us why?’. As we go through our Memory Channel Audit we often ask the customers ‘Where is the Validation report for this system?’ The customers almost always say ‘we have no idea!’. Call me old fashioned but I recall working for a large enterprise vendor (DEC) where you had to thoroughly test and validate a system and produce a report that proved, at the very least, you tested it and looked at the Signal Integrity. Given that our society is addicted to the internet, high speed communications, phones, laptops, air travel and on line everything, you would think that validating the platforms and systems that run all of these applications and make all of these critical calculations would at least have some kind of Validation Report. But they don’t and their customers are buying literally millions of them and the general public has become overly reliant on them. The engineers who deploy these systems and are responsible for them in the field should not buy them unless the suppliers PROVE they are good. Given that we are so addicted to the online world we have created we should pressure...
by Barbara Aichinger | Feb 26, 2018 | DDR4 Memory, Medical Device Safety
FAST SODIMMS for DDR4 are here! Traditionally SODIMMs (Small Outline DIMM) have been used in the mobile environment because of their smaller size. For DDR3 SODIMMs did not have ECC so they were not even considered for Servers. When DDR4 was created there was discussions within JEDEC for SODIMMs to be used in more robust environments so ECC was added to the specification. However, due to the smaller mechanical size of an SODIMM, memory capacity is limited. Here at FuturePlus we make sure all our DDR Validation Tools work in a variety of systems and at all supported speeds. The best way to do that is to validate our tools in as many platforms as we can get our hands on. Which leads me to this little baby! Yes this ASRock is water cooled! We had some fun setting it up and adjusting the mood lights it comes with to make the water look pretty. It has 4 SODIMM channels and each channel is a single slot. In addition these SODIMMs are vertically mounted. Those of you who are true SODIMM fans know that in most cases the SODIMMs are mounted on an angle so as to reduce vertical height. So how does this memory bus look? ASROCK SODIMM 3200MT/s: Measurement made with a FuturePlus Systems FS2836 and a Keysight Logic Analyzer Take a look at those EYES! This is a burst scan of both the read data and write data. You can see that the eyes allow for ample margin for signal capture. This Asrock system looks, well….rock solid! ASROCK SODIMM 3200MT/s: Measurement made with a FuturePlus Systems...
by Barbara Aichinger | Sep 1, 2017 | Medical Device Safety
Many medical device manufacturers are experts on the medical portion of their product, but what about the compute engine? This is the part that does not touch the patient but makes the decision based on the data. Many medical device manufacturers use off the shelf DDR3 or DDR4 embedded motherboards to be part of their overall system. But what do they know about them? In most cases they just ASSume that proper validation was done and that there is nothing to fear! Well they are not exactly correct. Take a look at what we found A medical device manufacturer complained of intermittent memory failures that caused their medical device to hang or crash. The failures were troublesome but random and not easy to isolate. The team looked for months but could not isolate the failures enough to find root cause. FuturePlus Systems to the rescue! Within 3 days we found the problem. The BIOS was not setting ODT correctly in the DRAMs Mode Registers. It turns out the BIOS was recently updated and a bug was introduced that was not setting up the DIMMs correctly. Here is a picture of what a few of the DDR3 Memory data signals looked like. Figure 1: Eye Scan using the Keysight U4154B and a FuturePlus Systems interposer. Figure 2: ODT at the proper settings. Eye Scan using the Keysight U4154B and a FuturePlus Systems interposer Vive la difference!!! So what’s in your medical device system? Don’t be liable for not doing ‘due diligence’ on every part of your product. FuturePlus Systems offers a Memory Subsystem Audit to ensure quality and proper operation. ...
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