Maintenance Challenge: Troubleshooting Broken Computer Chips

Original Scientific Paper distributed under the CC BY 4.0

Year 2023, Volume 3, Issue 1-2, Pages 1-8

Jezdimir Knezevic 

MIRCE Akademy, Woodbury Park, Exeter, United Kingdom

jk@mirceakademy.com

Computer chips are essential providers of functionality of today's advanced digital systems. However, digital systems are different from traditional electromechanical systems, as they are an integrated, tangle of electrical, mechanical and electronic parts. Nevertheless, they do fail and need to be maintained. Unfortunately, it is impossible to troubleshoot a computer chip by looking for physical evidence of failure. A broken chip neither looks any different from a healthy one, nor, leaks, vibrates or makes a noise. Faulty software within them doesn’t leave puddles or stains as evidence of its failure. Even more, it is physically impossible to see 1s and 0s falling off the end of a connector pin. Thus, the main objective of this paper is to address the challenges and possible solutions related to the troubleshooting broken computer chips and associated digital systems. Challenges are shared between the system designers who conceive their complexity in the design office, on one hand, and system maintainers whose corrective maintenance actions are initiated by detecting and understanding failure causes, locations and determining appropriate maintenance actions on the other. Regretfully they do not work together and it is safe to conclude that they do not even meet, as they work for different companies.  Hence, a closer collaboration between them, at the learning stages of their lives, is the obvious way forward. However, current educational and training institutions, world-wide, do not facilitate that integration. Even further, the situation is very much the same with corresponding professional organisations and societies.

The paper is commemorating the 10th anniversary of the death of Jack Hessburg (1934-2013), the first Chief Mechanic of Boeing New Airplanes and the Grand Fellow of MIRCE Akademy. His genius helped me to understand that the word maintenance has two meanings, the common one that is “fixing broken stuff” and his, which is the “management of failures”. [1] Jack continuously inspired me to research deeper and deeper in the fascinating world of aircraft troubleshooting reality, pointing out that “Broken chips don’t leak, vibrate or make noise”.

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