EEPROM Damage Question/Discussion

[jhunter1163]

Hello all,

I am a member over at the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) forum, and we've been having a rather lively discussion regarding the conditions under which transient voltages can damage EEPROM. This discussion can be found here:

http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=66047&page=60

Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help.

[jhunter1163]

Here's a better phrasing of the question.

"I have a question about the EEPROM data storage used in flight data recorders. I have been reading about the FDR found in the Pentagon after the crash there on Sept 11/01, and that it seems to be missing the last several seconds of data. That would represent several full frames of data. If the FDR was working properly right up to impact then how can more than just the last word in the last frame be lost? After all, the previous words would have already been recorded and set.

I know that transients can corrupt an EEPROM and obviously the power down procedure was not carried out but how could that explain a loss of up to 6 seconds without completely corrupting everything?"

Again, thanks for your help.