Read a few of the stories about #Voyager 1’s memory problems, but people don’t say how it was organized.
If the failed chip contained whole words, then just that chunk of memory would fail. If it contained one bit of many words, all those words would be affected.
That suggests a design rule for long running spacecraft - use whole word memory devices so a failure doesn’t knock out even more memory. Same for chip design, put related bits nearby on the chip. Wonder if they have this rule…
