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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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16 years ago

Max 2 IC occasionally gets destroyed

In my hardware environment, a "Max 2" IC occasionally gets destroyed - it pulls down the 3.3 V power supply. What can be the cause for this? Can it be anything else than electrostatic discharge? The ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
16 years ago

if there is a loop break it or make it as smal as possible.

if your designs get unstable with such loops then look at it again.

whenever possible just connect everything to one pc and connect all devices on your setup to only one ac source. avoid a setup where pc with blaster is on ac phase 1 and scope on ac phase 2. i have seen currents on such gnd loops. this should not happen as you live in zürich and your equiment needs to meet certification procedures.

what is unclear now is, when will your maxII be destroyed.

it can be destroyed during or after programming.

do you have boards that still survive ?

i knew that cyclone III are more sensitive to the powersupply than cyclone II was.

you say your maxII occasionally gets destroid. is it realy dead ?

a had been seeking very long for the reason why some maxII epm570 devices do not work properly out of a production pcb set and with mysupport at the end it was a quartus setting and now ALL boards work fine.