Problems with chips from the TAIWAN foundry.

Question

​I am having problems with an Altera Cyclone III FPGA. We have been using this part for several years without problems. However, now we are getting parts that are source from the TAIWAN foundry which are not working correctly. Is there any way to get parts sourced from KOREA? The part is EP3C16F484C8N

yuanli_s_intel · Answer

Hi Stanley,May i know how many unit you received is not working properly? I would suggest to go for ERMA process. Meanwhile for the part source, apologize that we distribute it to our distributor. If you have any concern such as to get part sourced from Korea only, i would suggest to work with your FAE / distributor for this. Regards,YL

stanima · Answer

​At this time we have 4 failing units in house and 2 at customer installations. All 4 in house units have a TAIWAN foundry mark with the date codes:GBCAAA1507ENCAAA545723N90GE5C00andGBCAAA1825EVCAAA787523P9GE8N00We have one unit with the lower date code that works properly. I wanted to get a FPGA from the KOREA foundry to replace on one of the failing units, to see if it would fix the problem. We have not seen any issues with units that have a FPGA with a KOREA foundry mark.Our FPGA logic has four identical frequency dividers that divide a 500,000 Hz clock down to 100 Hz. One of these 4 dividers will on average miss counting 20% of the pulses. The other three dividers work properly.Our distributor has no control over which foundry his parts come from. I don't know who my FAE would be. How do I find out?ThanksStanley Wawrowski

stanima · Answer

*   At this time we have 4 failing units in house and 2 at customer installations. All 4 in house units have a TAIWAN foundry mark with the date codes:

GBCAAA1507E
NCAAA54572
3N90GE5C00

and

GBCAAA1825E
VCAAA78752
3P9GE8N00

We have one unit with the lower date code that works properly. I wanted to get a FPGA from the KOREA foundry to replace on one of the failing units, to see if it would fix the problem. We have not seen any issues with units that have a FPGA with a KOREA foundry mark.

Our FPGA logic has four identical frequency dividers that divide a 500,000 Hz clock down to 100 Hz. One of these 4 dividers will on average miss counting 20% of the pulses. The other three dividers work properly.

Our distributor has no control over which foundry his parts come from. I don't know who my FAE would be. How do I find out?

Thanks
Stanley Wawrowski

yuanli_s_intel · Answer

Hi Stanley,I would suggest to go for ERMA process for the failing unit. Please let me know if you are ok with that.Also, may i know what is the failure unit and the total number of unit?Regards,YL

stanima · Answer

​What is the ERMA process? And how would I start one?The failure process is described above in my previous reply. The unit we are experiencing failure in is our Model 7210A Controller. Thus far we know of 6 units experiencing the problem in the field. We expect more report failures from the field. We are also testing units in production to weed out this failure before it gets to the customer.

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Problems with chips from the TAIWAN foundry.

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