Designing reliable systems with unreliable components

Many electronics experts predicted that component failures (in particular, tube failures) in the pioneering ENIAC machine would be so frequent that the machine would never be useful. But the engineers (system architects) and component manufacturers improved their art over time to improve the system’s availability. Their achievement of remarkably low failure rates should serve as an inspiration to chip- and system-level designers today. Three articles in this general issue of IEEE Micro address the challenge of reliable designs of the future.