Forum Discussion
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
17 years agoI wouldn't rule anything out, but everything is really as close to identical as I can imagine. Each chip has its own set of linear voltage regulators, decoupling caps, and oscillator and the layout of each block is copied and pasted from the original. Even the length of the supply feeds of the regulators to the main power bus is identical. That bus is a .5" wide trace so I doubt being a few inches nearer to or farther from the source on that would be significant. And to that end, actually the chip farthest from the main source has been one of the reliable ones.
I've swapped out enough regulators to pretty much rule out any problems there. If I had a few extra chips things would be much easier to test. For future reference, is this sort of stock issue typical of Altera products? Thanks, -JNS.