Does thunder own any effect on a pacemaker?

Answers:
Pacemakers can register the effects of severe solar storms, though there is no exposure to the patient from the 'glitches' that go on.

Modern pacemakers are certainly small computers that run sophisticated programs. That means they are subject to radiation-induced, SEUs only like satellite electronics.

Energetic particle reaching the ground can cause pacemaker glitches that are, fortunately, undetectable to the user.

'They Call Them 'Satellite Anomalies" - The 23rd Cycle .Even more troubling than satellite electronics is that spirited neutrons produced when solar flare particles strike atoms surrounded by the Earth's atmosphere, can travel all the approach to the ground. There they affect aircraft avionics causing acting glitches in both civilian and military aircraft. About one within ten avionics errors are 'unconfirmed' which means that no in plain sight hardware or software problem could have cause them. One important source of information on these particle is cardiac pacemakers. Millions of these are installed within people, copious of whom take trips on spray planes. They record any irregularities contained by the rate at which they trigger their pulses, and this information can be examined when they return to ground. These errors, among airline staff, do correlate with cosmic streak, and solar activity level."

Single Event Upsets in Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators. "Single event upsets own been observed within implantable cardiac defibrillators. The incidence of SEUs is well (single-event effects), such as soft errors, hold since the early 1980s appeard within commercial electronics, but they are now becoming the dominant reliability-failure instrument in modern CMOS technology. These types of errors forced Sun to recall workstations surrounded by the late '90s and, EDN have learned, also cause failures within memories and ASICs controlling a Cisco router . Experts say that these effects will soon become more commonplace surrounded by logic as processes head into 65- and 45-nanometer nodes.Baumann and Paul Dodd, another foremost expert on SEEs and acting inspector for the radiation-effects department at Sandia National Laboratories (Albuquerque, NM), says that commercial designs are also more frequently encounter SEEs but that designers are commonly missing or misidentifying them as other failures. "It could be going on on everyone's PC, but instead everyone curses Microsoft," says Dodd. "Software bugs probably lead to a lot of those blue-screen problems, but you can trace some of them rear to radiation effects." And designers cannot yet quantify the breadth of the problem because, as IC-design and EDA consultant Pallab Chatterjee points out, "It is something companies don't brag give or take a few."

The subject of SEEs is old helmet to designers of radiation-hardened devices and DRAMs and to companies such as International Rectifier, which has for years be SEE-hardening designs for aerospace applications in which radiation exists and reliability is a must (Reference 4). Researchers contained by the late '70s observed the problem within terrestrial applications, and it crept contained by the 1980s into commercial applications running terrestrially. Alpha particles from collection materials caused SEEs that first artificial DRAM, and, through process refinement, these particle have dwindle common, but they still article for roughly 30% of all SEEs, Baumann estimates. Thermal neutrons from cosmic radiation of punch less than 15 eV (electron volts) or earthly high-energy cosmic particles, such as neutrons, protons, and muons, also result in SEEs (Figure 1). These particles make happen reactions next to silicon and oxygen nuclei and break them apart, going away ionizing fragments, which in turn generate a charge—not a desirable effect, according to Baumann.

According to Steve Wender, group captain at the Los Alamos (NM) Neutron Science Center testing facility, placing six inches of steel shield around a device achieve only a twofold modification in FIT. At tiniest five classes of SEE exist. If any of these effects occurs contained by a toy or a cell phone, it may be trivial and might not preclude a further purchase, but if they occur within a mission-critical device, such as a pacemaker, a drive-by-wire brake system, or even a handheld device for transferring funds between bank accounts, a three-second glitch can become a debacle. (Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- 5/12/2005
EDN )

Soft errors' impact on system reliability . The rate at which SEUs occur is given as SER, and you determine it in FITs (failures surrounded by time), which is the number of failures contained by 1 billion device-operation hours. A measurement of 1000 FITs corresponds to a MTTF (mean time to failure) of approximately 114 years. The potential impact on typical memory applications illustrate the importance of considering soft errors. A cell phone near one 4-Mbit, low-power memory with an SER of 1000 FITs per megabit will possible have a soft error every 28 years. A high-end router beside 10 Gbits of SRAM and an SER of 600 FITs per megabit can experience an error every 170 hours. For a router farm that uses 100 Gbits of memory, a potential network error interrupting its proper operation could occur every 17 hours. Finally, consider a human being on an airplane over the Atlantic at 35,000 ft working on a laptop with 256 Mbytes (2 Gbits) of memory. At this altitude, the SER of 600 FITs per megabit become 100,000 FITs per megabit, resulting in a potential error every five hours. The FIT rate of soft errors is more than 10 times the typical FIT rate for a intricate reliability failure. Soft errors are not matching concern for cell phones as they can be for systems using a large amount of memory.

High-energy cosmic particle react beside the upper atmosphere of the Earth, and their collisions, modulated by solar flares and intergalactic cosmic rays, generate high-energy protons and neutrons. High-energy neutrons have energies of 10 to 800 MeV; surrounded by contrast, protons have energies greater than 30 MeV. High-energy neutrons hold no charge; therefore, they do not coulombically interact near the semiconductor material, so their interaction next to silicon differs from that of an alpha particle. For a high-energy neutron to wreak a soft error, it must produce ionized particles by colliding beside the silicon nucleus and undergoing impact ionization near the silicon nuclei. This collision can generate alpha particle and other heavier ions, thus producing electron-hole pairs but with better energies than a typical alpha particle from mold compounds. Neutrons are principally troublesome, because they can penetrate most manmade construction; for example, a neutron can endorse through five feet of concrete. The flux rate is geoposition-dependent and increases at greater altitudes due to a lower shielding effect of the atmosphere. In London, the effect is 1.2 times worse than at the equator. In Denver, with its lofty altitude, the effect is three times worse than at sea rank in San Francisco. In an airplane, the effect can be 100 to 800 times worse than on the ground. (Ritesh Mastipuram and Edwin C Wee, Cypress Semiconductor -- EDN, 9/30/2004)

LASERs Simulate Space Radiation Effects . One widely used approach is to sign up microelectronic devices that have be specially designed and engineered to be invulnerable to the space radiation environment or, at least, more tolerant of the environment. However, nouns of such devices is expensive, and their performance (processor speed, for example) across the world lags the performance of commercially available nontolerant devices by 10 years or more. A growing body of literature have recently be developed around SEP in the earthly environment. The most energetic cosmic rays gain access to the Earth's magnetic pen and interact with nitrogen and oxygen nucleus in the upper atmosphere. These nuclear interactions surrender neutrons that can penetrate to the ground. Anyone who uses a solid-state digital camera can notice these events simply by taking extended "exposures" in the night. Frame-to-frame variations within the output in the form of intense, single-pixel spikes are due to cosmic stream effects. Aircraft designers at Boeing, Airbus, and elsewhere are now taking vindication of SEP in systems design for aircraft that fly at better altitudes (above 30,000 feet). Manufacturers of pacemakers for control of heartbeat irregularities verbs about SEP effects on the carrying out of microcontrollers within the pacemaker. Finally, microelectronic device concert may be degraded by SEP due to alpha particle putrefaction from radioactive isotopes of ions that are impurities contained by metals commonly used for the microelectronics themselves. (Susan Humphrey, Stephen LaLumondiere and Steven Moss, The Aerospace Corporation, Winter-2000 magazine)

Soft errors caused by single event upsets surrounded by CMOS processes
" Radiation-induced single event upsets (SEUs) pose a major provoke for the design of memories and logic circuits in high-performance microprocessors within technologies beyond 90 nanometers. Historically, we hold considered power-performance-area trade offs. There is a need to include the soft error rate (SER) as another design parameter. In this broadsheet, we present radiation particle interactions next to silicon, charge collection effects, soft errors, and their effect on VLSI circuits. We also discuss the impact of SEUs on system reliability. We describe an accelerated height of SERs using a high-intensity neutron beam, the characterization of SERs within sequential logic cells, and technology scale trends. Finally, some directions for future research are given..In 1996, a survey of computer log files showed that a supercomputer next to 156 Gbit of DRAM could fail several times per year, and the incidence of soft errors in implanted pacemaker was almost the same as if the errors be caused by conditions neutron radiation." (Karnik, T.; Hazucha, P. in IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, Vol. 1, Issue 2, April-June 2004, pp.128 - 143)

Not unless it hits the pacemaker or you are on the cloud itself.

No, thunder is simply a nouns. It would have no effect whatsoever on a pacemaker

If it happen very close to the pacemaker wearer.

Lightning could own an effect on a pacemaker. Any electric or magnetic paddock strong enough can effect it if the pacemaker get close enough to it. If you hold any doubts about your pacemaker see your MD ASAP.

Thunder no..but the electric pasture from the lightning that caused the thunder..i would reckon so. If it can cook your TV it can take prudence of your pacemaker. I would think if you already have a pacemaker and you were struck by lightning..the affects on your pacemaker would be minimal compared to what the lightning did to you.

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Does thunder own any effect on a pacemaker?

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