Hi Mike,

Have you tried ESD zapping the various inputs and outputs of the
device to see what effects you can elicit? We had a situation where an
instrumentation amp which did not connect to a user-touchable part
would latch up under a relatively mild ESD zap through the ground of
the PCB it was on. The part would then destroy itself thermally within
seconds.

Perhaps you could also try zapping some of these ICs to see if you can
get them to fail latently. An ESD test gun is about $5000 to buy, and
$500 per month to rent.

Sean


On Jan 9, 2008 9:27 AM, Mike Hord <mike.hord@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sean AND Paul-
>
> On Jan 8, 2008 9:30 PM, Sean Breheny <shb7@cornell.edu> wrote:
> > I had a case where the manufacturer did this for me free (it was a
> > Lattice FPGA with an IO port which didn't work - it was determined to
> > be due to a static hit). They even sent me a full report with color
> > photos (under an optical microscope). If you buy enough of them (and
> > in this case it was a part which is $16 each in quantity), they may do
> > this for you.
>
> One of the manufacturers has already been gracious enough to do this
> for us.  We may contact the other (there are two chips by two different
> companies involved here), if we get more failures on the second product.
>
> > On Jan 8, 2008 7:04 PM, Paul Hutchinson <paullhutchinson@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > If you can afford to spend 10's to 100's of thousands of dollars (possibly
> > > millions) then there are firms that can diagnose the failures for you. They
> > > can use X-ray machines, remove the packaging and inspect with a scanning
> > > electron microscope, as well as other exotic and expensive procedures to
> > > determine the precise nature of failure.
>
> We've already been in touch with one of those companies- they have done
> quite a bit (though not enough) for us already.  THEY claim that this was a
> simple case of overvoltage- our power supply was too hot, the chips fried,
> end of story.  Nothing I have done has repeated that, however, so I'm VERY
> skeptical about it.
>
> Price has been in the thousands, but could easily creep up past that 5-figure
> mark.
>
>
> Mike H.
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