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chris_valast Friday at 9:45 PM3 repliesview on HN

I highly recommend finding a cloud chamber (various science museums have them) to visualize just how much radiation is flying around.

Part of my work touches high power switches. I am going to do a bad job relating this story, but one of the power engineers was talking about how electric train switches in EU (Switzerland?) were having triggering issues. These were big MW scale IGBTs, not something you want to false trigger. Anyway, they eventually traced the problem to cosmic rays, and just turned the entire package vertical so the die was end-on to space (the mountains around were shielding the horizontal direction), and the problem went away.


Replies

Neywinylast Saturday at 12:25 AM

Always good to support the IGBT community

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SkiFire13last Saturday at 9:14 AM

> just turned the entire package vertical so the die was end-on to space (the mountains around were shielding the horizontal direction), and the problem went away.

That's a pretty cool solution! For some reason I was expecting something a lot more elaborated

actionfromafarlast Friday at 9:54 PM

That's very P. K. Dick. Or maybe more Heinlein.