Predictable senility allows boffins to spot recycled NAND chips

With the embedded device market booming and semiconductor companies hard-pressed to keep up with demand, the re-circulation of older memory chips has grown in recent years. Because chips become more apt to fail as they get older, newer devices that are outfitted with recycled chips will be more likely to experience problems.

The group hopes that the techniques could be used by manufacturers to test and weed out the older chips that, in an industrial control device, would cause the entire unit to go down should they fail. In the process, they hope to make embedded and industrial devices more reliable over the long-term.