Latent design faults in the development of Multiflow´s TRACE/200

The author recounts some of the more notable design faults that appeared during the development of the Multiflow TRACE/200 series of minisupercomputers. During development of the TRACE, the design errors found appeared to be largely random and uncorrelated. However, it appears that a fairly small set of categories can nearly span the set. These faults fall roughly into a few categories: interface misassumptions, stale-instructions-in-cache, parity-related, designer errors, CAD tools, and parts with defective designs. Specific examples are given for each category, and corrections for these design flaws are mentioned.<>