[DigitalToday reporter Jinju Hong (홍진주)] PC hardware monitoring program HWiNFO has been confirmed as having been used in a U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) semiconductor radiation experiment. Interest is growing after a case was disclosed in which free software commonly used by general users to check PC status was also used in research settings in the space and aviation fields.

On June 4 local time, online media outlet Gigazine reported. The official HWiNFO website says the program is "being used to monitor computer system failures in high-radiation environments." NASA research documents were also released along with the description.

HWiNFO is a hardware monitoring program that can check in real time the status of key PC components such as the CPU and GPU, memory, storage devices and cooling fans in a Windows 11 environment. It can record and graph a wide range of information including temperature, operating clock speed, power consumption, fan speed and memory usage, and is widely used among custom PC users and hardware enthusiasts.

According to materials released by NASA, HWiNFO was used as a tool to track system status during actual semiconductor radiation-hardness experiments. The details are included in a report titled "AMD Processor Radiation Test Results" released in 2013.

At the time, NASA conducted an experiment to evaluate how chips manufactured at overseas semiconductor production facilities respond under radiation conditions similar to the space environment. The test subject was an AMD A4-3300 processor produced at GlobalFoundries' plant in Germany.

Researchers used HWiNFO to monitor in real time changes in the status of the CPU and GPU while irradiating the system. They continuously recorded temperature, operating status and whether the system was abnormal.

Interesting results were also observed in the experiment. NASA data showed a phenomenon in which the processor temperature appeared to drop on an infrared thermal imaging camera, but internal sensor values recorded by HWiNFO instead showed an increase.

NASA raised the possibility that a diode for measuring internal processor temperature may have been affected during radiation exposure. It explained that sensor malfunction due to radiation, rather than an actual temperature change, could have distorted the readings.

The case shows that consumer hardware monitoring software can be used not only as a simple PC management tool but also in scientific experiments and semiconductor reliability evaluation processes. It also suggests that in extreme environments it is difficult to rely only on measurements based on internal sensors.

The industry assesses the case as showing that, in high-reliability system verification processes, the accuracy of the measuring equipment itself should also be verified. It also means that in areas dealing with extreme environments such as aerospace, the defence industry and semiconductor verification, an approach that cross-verifies multiple measurement methods is important rather than relying on single-sensor data.

Meanwhile, HWiNFO is still provided for free and is widely used not only for checking PC hardware status but also in various benchmarking and system analysis environments. The NASA case remains an interesting example showing that such general-purpose software can be used in unexpected research settings.