Hi together,
looking at modern products repairing them becomes increasingly difficult. Due to the massive use of programmable logic and software residing in flash memory - there are lots of componentes which can not be checked or replaced - even if they are known to be defective... Sometimes even the original manufacturer is not able to supply the right chips to fix the problem. My question is how the know how residing in such chips can be saved prior to their death? For software there exists an archiv (bitsaver.org) to preserve it, but how e.g. on fuse-lists of FPGAs?
Logic devices are hard to read out without the appropriate programmer. Even if they are in a socket the protection fuse my prevent reading... Is there any experience how long EEPROM-based FPGAs and CPLDs really keep their programming?
The actual reason for my fear of these components is that test equipemt, especially high quality one like tektronix or agilent, always was an investment for many years - who is not happy about his working Tek535 on a cold winter day? Recently there came up relatively many of high end oscilloscopes (545xx) on eBay with comments like "out of service", "agilent refused to repair", "not serviceable". Since I own such a device, I suspect the ALTERA EPM5128 or the soldered in flash memory beeing the problem. Honestly speaking I was shocked that HP/agilent oscilloscopes are "not servicable" only a couple of years after they have been discontiuned :-(
Thanks god, my 54542a still works...
Erik.