Comment on Why a Helium Leak Disabled Every iPhone in a Medical Facility
veeesix@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
[…] so why were only Apple phones affected?
The answer, it seems, is because Apple recently defected from traditional quartz-based clocks in its phones in favor of clocks that are also made of MEMS silicon. Given that clocks are the most critical device in any computer and are necessary to make the CPU function, their disruption with helium atoms is enough to crash the device.
In this case, the leaking helium from the MRI machine infiltrated the iPhones like a “tiny grain of sand” and caused the MEMS clocks to go haywire.
otter@lemmy.ca 5 weeks ago
…wikipedia.org/…/Microelectromechanical_system_os…
Interesting
So the helium causes physical interference by leaking into the housing?
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 5 weeks ago
Yup. Helium is such a tiny thing it can diffuse through almost anything, and in MEMS oscillators which are supposed to be at a rock solid 32kHz, causes variance in the frequency eventually just “gumming” it up entirely and causing it to stop working.
If you want to know how and why, Applied Science did a video on it. Five years ago. Because that’s when this leak happened.
IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 5 weeks ago
Yup. Most of the mems devices will essentially shut down the device if they go out of tolerance. This is a pretty common-knowledge fact among folks who work with large magnets, or with helium or hydrogen gas.
Funnily enough, it also happens with equipment microcontrollers which are unlikely to have a MEMS unit in them – for instance, any benchtop centrifuge made after the mid-90s will shut down, and I’m pretty sure those are still on quartz clocks. It also effects things like on-chip thermometers.