Hi,

> In the real world the bottom line is that PICs may be ugly, but they sure
> are tough - at least in comparison to MSP430's!

    All the semi companies are migrating their designs to smaller dies and
we should all be prepared for worse reliability when ESD happens !! It is
not a privilege of the MSP430, it will happen to the pic's also when
microchip shrink's their process. Good design practice is to get away those
microprocessor pins from ESD. Deal with it before and do not count on the
internal diodes to block it.

    I can tell you some dozens of examples where this happened to PIC's also
!! Bad design is bad design with any processor.

Best regards,
Alexandre Guimaraes

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