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Cake day: June 25th, 2024

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  • Do you have any idea the amount of error correction needed to get a regular desktop computer to do its thing? Between the peripheral bus and the CPU, inside your RAM if you have ECC, between the USB host controller and your printer, between your network card and your network switch/router, and so on and so forth. It’s amazing that something as complex and using such fast signalling as a modern PC does can function at all. At the frequencies that are being used to transfer data around the system, the copper traces behave more like radio frequency waveguides than they do wires. They are just “suggestions” for the signals to follow. So there’s tons of crosstalk/bleed over and external interference that must be taken into account.

    Basically, if you want to send high speed signals more than a couple centimeters and have them arrive in a way that makes sense to the receiving entity, you’re going to need error correction. Having “error correction” doesn’t mean something is bad. We use it all the time. CRC, checksums, parity bits, and many other techniques exist to detect and correct for errors in data.