Quick question for you all...

How real is the threat of frying a chip simply by measuring various
values of its circuitry with a multimeter that's powered by a battery
of a higher voltage than the chip is rated to handle?

We'd built up a nice wire-wrapped circuit around an important IC and
were measuring resistances and voltage differences between different
points on our board, searching for potential shorts, etc., when we
realized that our tiny Radio Shack multimeter was powered by a 12V
battery! The chip itself operates at 3.3V and has an absolute max of
6V. Have we likely fried this thing?

Seems almost Heisenberg-ian... ruining it by measuring it...

Thanks for your help.

Julian
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