has anyone 'worn out' a pic?

[glmclell]

I've been programming my pic like mad the past few weeks, some days doing 50 or more flashes to the chip using an on chip serial boot loader.

How firm is Microchip's 100,000 write rating on their flash rom? I worry about it being grosely overstated, kind of like hard drive MTBF's (300,000 hours my arse!)

similarlly, is the EEPROM really good for 1 million writes, or is it just a few tens of thousands?

what happens when the flash or prom is no longer writeable, does the chip tell you, or just pretend to be writing ... is there a writes counter or something?

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I've never heard of one wearing out, certainly I've never had one do so, and I've done an awful lot of writes to a chip over the years - I've still got my first 16C84, and that's still going strong.

From what I can make of the MicroChip specifications the values you quoted are guaranteed minimums, they should exceed those easily.

Bear in mind that 50 writes a day is almost 6 years continuous use to reach 100,000 writes - I suspect you would wear out first :lol:

 

[kentken]

I have had some that I wore the finish off of the pins, but they still worked.
I had some others that just seamed to die.
They could still be programmed, but they wouldn't 'turn on'(other chip would work fine).

Did you fry the chip? Hook it up wrong? Put it into the programmer backwards?
Some times it just happens.
Hope you have more

Kent

 

[olly_k]

Hook it up wrong? Put it into the programmer backwards?

I've done both those to my trusty f628 (on purpose, of course ) and it still works impecibly
The only thing that would worry me, should you ever exceed the limit, is maybe that errors could start occuring that would have you debugging code which appears to be fine.... I experienced somthing like this when using a DOS based TASM compiler on an f84 once, and after lots of head scratching, I updated the hardware which allowed me to use Microchip software and no-longer had any problems

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I've done both those to my trusty f628 (on purpose, of course ) and it still works impecibly

I've burnt my fingers on PIC's put in backwards 8)

And they still work OK (the PIC's, not the fingers!).

 

[laroche73]

True story, one of my favorites. Back in the 80's, when windowed EPROMs were the rage, all of us on a development team shared a common Data I/O programmer. One day, a software programmer came over to ask "what's it mean when the little orange light in the EPROM comes on?" The backwards inserted EPROM had to be pried/chipped off the socket with a screwdriver and hammer. I don't believe the EPROM ever worked right after that.

 

[Exo]

yeah, I made an error with a 12c508JW (window) once that turned it into a lightbulb ...

One advantage of windowed parts, you see it when somethings wrong

 

[StupidDum]

I have spoiled my PIC by..hm.. breaking the pin lead.
Thats it.

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

I have spoiled my PIC by..hm.. breaking the pin lead.
Thats it.

I fit all my PIC's with turned pin sockets during development, that way if you break anything it's only the turned pin socket. They also plug in and out of a DIL socket a lot cleaner because the pins are straight.

 

[kentken]

Cool, a Pic light .
I've hooked up the power pins wrong, and got a hot pic.
But still worked.

Kent