Do distributors still program micros?

Thanks. I'm designing a test fixture for use by the CM in Thailand, which is a bit more of a challenge.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Phil Hobbs
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Of course. But that does not stop it being a PITA. It is especially irritating when you have a stock of parts programmed with one software version, and the software changes. Distributor programming makes sense when you have big enough quantities and stable enough software.

Sometimes a compromise can be distributor programming of a bootloader or base software, and production/test/field programming of application software.

That is often the case, depending on the type of product.

The latest Cyclones can have lots of firmware images loaded, and can be connected to a barcode scanner to choose the exact image. This could let you have device revision barcodes on your boards ("Product X, revision y.z") and programming procedure of "scan the device barcode, then program in the image".

Reply to
David Brown

Depending on product a serial port or SD card slot works fine for field upgrades. Even many simple chips support having a boot-loader which can pull a binary + checksum from a data stream or file on startup and flash its own program memory.

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bitrex

We use SD cards on products that use a Zynq SOC, because it knows how to boot from one.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

The ARMs that we use can be reprogrammed many times. If the distributor-programmed code is wrong, we or they can reprogram. We could dump the bad-code parts into the "unprogrammed" stockroom bin.

We would have to create a new stock number for the chip with the new code, or alter the processes to reprogram on board via JTAG.

Sure, configuration control is a giant PITA. Not doing it is worse.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics
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John Larkin

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