While we tend to think of them as unchanging, perfect slabs, integrated circuits change over their lifetimes and eventually fail. Unsurprisingly, these effects

While we tend to think of them as unchanging, perfect slabs, integrated circuits change over their lifetimes and eventually fail. Unsurprisingly, these effects are greater when feature sizes are smaller. Here are some links I dug up on the subject: https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10nm/ https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n... http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7796117/ http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7796117/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-bias_temperature_instability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative-bias_temperature_inst... A vivid real world example of this was the 2011 Cougar Point chipset problem which would cause the SATA ports to essentially burn out well short of the expected lifetime of the system. https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10nm/ https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n...