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p.3 #11 · p.3 #11 · Are all our lenses and cameras going to bust in 10 years? | |
>Sure! I would love to hear about hot electrons.
All MOSFET-based microelectronic devices* are continually stressed in operation by hot electrons striking the interface or penetrating the gate insulator. These cause degradation of the transistor characteristics. Eventually a transistor will fail. Chips are designed to make this failure unlikely within the service lifetime- whatever that is. As with most failure mechanisms, some chips will last longer, some will last less long.
We should expect that any chip will eventually fail, and the more aggressive the design the sooner the failure.
Hot electrons are used to positive effect (strange expression here, 'cause they are negative, right?) to charge floating gates in flash memory. The number of electrons used to store a bit is countably small. Flash memory bits fail all the time; usually this is masked to the user by coding redundancy and algorithms that hide failed cells.
Cameras of old were mechanical, and could be disassembled and parts replaced. This is less and less true- even if the chips WERE available, repairing modern electronics is chancy.
We should not regard a camera as a valuable artifact, like a classic car that's fun to drive and will also increase in value. It's a tool, that will eventually fail and be unrepairable, with a value that will continually decline.
And unlike an old Leica, it's not even going to look ornamental on the shelf.
* Image sensors, and pretty much all the other chips in your camera, computer, and cell phone.
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