Every girl should have one...

[compilerbitch]

This thingy, believe it or not, emits a reset pulse within 20ns of a nearby nuclear detonation. You just never know when something like that will come in handy.

Comments

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I think the basic idea is that, since it responds within 20ns of the radiation pulse, you have time to trigger a bunch of protection devices before the EMP itself has time to damage anything. For example, if you have the right switching infrastructure, you could shut down most of an aircraft's wiring harness, either open circuit or wired to ground, whatever is most likely to work, and then do a hard restart a few milliseconds later, hopefully fast enough to not crash in the mean time. Actually, heavy power stuff is less likely to be damaged anyway, so I suspect that these things are aimed at allowing you to clamp something like a sensitive radio antenna preamp before the pulse hits. The other obvious application is forcing a reboot of any embedded processors you might have to clear any single-event upsets that might have resulted from the radiation.

I do a fair bit of work along the lines of rad hard electronics as part of my PhD research, but I'm mostly interested in deep space applications. I hope no one ever has to use those techniques to cope with the effects of a nuclear device.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Not as silly as it sounds... I mean, you've read Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley: the book's set in London a few years after anarchists take down all the banks and all the databases with flux-compression devices - powerful short-range EMP weapons.