Soft errors: is the concern for soft-errors overblown?

Cosmic ray particles have the ability to either toggle the state of memory elements or create unwanted glitches in combinational logic that may be latched by memory elements. As supply voltages reduce and feature sizes become smaller in future technologies, soft error tolerance is considered a significant challenge for designing future electronic systems. In some cases, the impact of soft errors is easily overblown. The real challenge at hand is to consider the kind of soft error protection and recovery mechanisms that can be provided while meeting other system parameters such as power consumption, performance, area usage and criticality of a failure. Another challenge is to understand the interactions of other optimizations targeted at other constraints such as performance or power consumption with soft error rates. It is important for system designers to perform soft error analysis to avoid repetitions of widely-publicised soft error failures