>Every time I saw someone buy a super duper
>do-them-all-50,000 chips programmer so far, I also saw
>the person discover that one of the few chips they
>wanted to program with it had buggy support, followed
>by interesting waiting time for the software update
>(is the email in yet - repeated every five minutes for
>as long as it takes).

I am always amazed (or maybe I shouldn't be) at the short lifetime of these
"do-all-chips" devices, as the developers find that they just cannot upgrade
the software to keep up with the changing programming strategies. I had
access to just such a device at one time, and had occasion to program a
number of chips, and ended up with about a 30% programming failure.

Investigation with a 'scope showed that the programming pulse timings were
nothing like the data sheet for the chip. It appeared that the chip maker
had a process change between the chips that (may) have been used to verify
the design, and now the timings were much more critical. I ended up building
a little tagboard programmer with some one shots that produced the correct
timings, and satisfactorily programmed the chips that had failed.

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