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Intel "bug buster" Intel preps technology to fix bugs in Pentium MPUs By Alexander Wolfe, EE Times Santa Clara, Calif. -- Intel Corp. plans to make a high-profile announcement next month that it has developed technology to quickly fix bugs that crop up in its microprocessors without having to recall the chips, EE Times has learned. "It's a piece of hidden technology in the processor, which enables the chip to be patched after it's been shipped," said a semiconductor expert who requested anonymity. Intel won't provide details on its bug-busting feature, though a company official said, "We're going to make it a big deal. The technology exists and we've been refining it over the past few months, finalizing some of the open-ended issues." Intel's intention to spotlight the feature--which has in fact been present in some form in a number of Intel CPUs for several years--appears aimed at several burning issues embroiling the microprocessor-design community. For one, though Intel regularly releases copious lists of bugs found by its own engineers, glitches uncovered by hackers have taken on a life of their own. The infamous Pentium FDIV floating-point division bug, first reported by EE Times in November 1994, led to a public-relations disaster for Intel that resulted in its first-ever chip recall and a charge against earnings of $475 million. Last month, Intel was buffeted by the disclosure on the Internet of a Pentium II glitch, known as the "Dan-0411 flag erratum." More ominously, a semiconductor verification crisis looms, as integrated-circuit transistor counts are expected to top 50 million within two years. Many industry experts believe the tools to ensure that such designs are free of flaws don't exis--and won't for years. Against such a backdrop, any technology that offers a quick and painless way of squashing bugs could provide an edge. "If Intel had talked about this last month, they could have turned the 'Dan-0411' disaster into a public-relations boon," said the chip expert. The feature, which is implemented on Intel's Pentium processors with MMX, Pentium II processors and on the Pentium Pro CPU, has been buried under the obscure moniker "BIOS Update Feature." Indeed, the capability isn't widely known even within the tight-knit community of microprocessor- and systems-software experts. "The way it works is you'd run a program at boot time, which would be incorporated into the BIOS and it would actually patch the microcode," the semiconductor expert said. (BIOS, or Basic Input/Output System, is firmware that executes upon start-up. Microcode is the most elementary form of machine instruction, controlling actual operation of the CPU. Patching or revising microcode is the most desirable way to fix a bug, since expensive hardware "mask" changes aren't required.) However, experts familiar with the BIOS Update Feature said there may be a large class of potential problems it can't fix. "You have to be dealing with bugs that involve a microcoded instruction," said the source who requested anonymity. "Something that involves the use of fixed, physical silicon resources can't be corrected by updating the BIOS." (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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