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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

Thank you for your advice about ground loops.

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do you have boards that still survive ?

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Yes, I am working currently with a board which has obviously survived.

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

it can be destroyed during or after programming.

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I don't know exactly when it is destroyed. There are only few examples of this failure. Maybe it happend always when the boards were not in use for some time. Maybe the storage place for the boards is not quite ESD proof. I will have to keep observing this issue.

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

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The current which flows through the destroyed board is more than 500 mA (even more than 2 A in the first moment after power-up). The voltage drops to 0.43 V within a few seconds. (The power supply can't provide enough power.) The Quartus programmer tells me: "Error: Can't access JTAG chain" Therefore I would say it's dead.