Corrosion of the bonding wires hadn't occurred to me... that could well be a possibility. (Although I suppose you'd have to *very carefully* crack open the case of a dead DRAM and look at it under a microscope to really say if that's what is going on.) If it *is* some sort of internal corrosion that's killing these units it would seem that "Chip Rot" might a better name for it than "Bit Rot", given the conflict with the widely-used definition for the latter.
(IE, "Bit Rot" describes the data loss from aging or physical degradation, rather than being a technical term for a specific type of physical degradation process affecting the hardware. The only way the standard definition of "Bit Rot" applies to DRAM is the corruption of data in a "live system" due to soft errors, IE, bits flipped due to static discharges, alpha particles, cosmic rays, etc. Since DRAM doesn't retain data when powered off by design it cannot *itself* suffer from "Bit Rot".)
Anyway, seriously, I was curious if the term was being used specifically here to denote some manufacturing or process weakness widespread in chips of this age, and if there were a reference one could point to when "diagnosing" a failure of this type as "Bit Rot". Otherwise it doesn't seem like it's useful to diagnose these chip failures as such.
(I vaguely remember a term similar to "chip rot" being used in an article I read *many moons ago* in an 80's computer magazine to describe an age-related failure in early PROM chips, PROMs being programmable memories which store bits essentially by "blowing fuses" instead of retaining a charge like an EPROM. PROMs were widely used in early S-100 and other low production volume computer systems, and I *seem* to recall that the problem was traced to a "Tin Whiskers"-type phenomenon inside the packaging... but it's been far too long for me to remember specifically.)
(IE, "Bit Rot" describes the data loss from aging or physical degradation, rather than being a technical term for a specific type of physical degradation process affecting the hardware. The only way the standard definition of "Bit Rot" applies to DRAM is the corruption of data in a "live system" due to soft errors, IE, bits flipped due to static discharges, alpha particles, cosmic rays, etc. Since DRAM doesn't retain data when powered off by design it cannot *itself* suffer from "Bit Rot".)
Anyway, seriously, I was curious if the term was being used specifically here to denote some manufacturing or process weakness widespread in chips of this age, and if there were a reference one could point to when "diagnosing" a failure of this type as "Bit Rot". Otherwise it doesn't seem like it's useful to diagnose these chip failures as such.
(I vaguely remember a term similar to "chip rot" being used in an article I read *many moons ago* in an 80's computer magazine to describe an age-related failure in early PROM chips, PROMs being programmable memories which store bits essentially by "blowing fuses" instead of retaining a charge like an EPROM. PROMs were widely used in early S-100 and other low production volume computer systems, and I *seem* to recall that the problem was traced to a "Tin Whiskers"-type phenomenon inside the packaging... but it's been far too long for me to remember specifically.)