[gorgoiler]

Something about e-fuses seems quite mystical. The idea of a computer program deliberately and permanently damaging its own hardware (or hardware it is attached to) using a mechanism so close to regular operation (current flowing in memory) but for a good reason rather than to cause harm, and in such an information rich way.

Different to say a robotic tool using its tooltip to maim itself and different to one robot building another, because at the e-fuse level of detail it’s so much more information sense.

Perhaps it’s like a tattoo? Perhaps I’m thinking of the ship tattoos in Surface Detail by Iain M Banks?

[oakwhiz]

Another way to think of it is, a memory-mapped set of wires that are made too thin, and when read, correspond to ones. If ones are written to that region, they become zeroes every time they are read afterward. This is kind of the reverse of how memory normally works.

Of course the actual mechanism used in OTP memory is different...

[peter_d_sherman]

I think it would be interesting to learn the history of e-fuses as applies to CPU architecture... That is, where/how/when were they invented, what was the first CPU to use them, for what purpose, and which CPU's have used them since that point in time... Maybe I'll post to Ask HN or one of the StackOverflow websites about this in the future...