Re: melting through 2901s?

On Wed, 07 Feb 2001 14:19:07 -0800, "Clay Cowgill" <vector_clay@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>>I've got a couple of Tempest aux boards that have AMD 2901s that seem to
>>have been melted through to the chip center. There is a Battlezone aux
>>board on eBay right now that shows the same characteristics.
>>
>>http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=556670453
>>
>>Is there any reason for this?
>
>I don't think it's a "melting" as much as explosion damage. ;-)
>
>If the die in the chip carrier fails in a sufficiently spectacular way it'll
>basically turn into a little space heater. The die area will get extremely
>hot (very quickly) and the plastic DIP carrier can't dissipate the heat
>quickly enough. The result is usually the carrier "blowing open" leaving a
>little crater-shaped hole in the top of the package.
>

Yeah, I remember in the "good ol' days" when we had eproms go bad (we're talking
2708 and 2716, the real "old" days), we would solder all the legs on one side
together, and then all the legs on the other side together.

We would then solder a power cord to the two sides, and then using a nice long
extension cord we'd plug it in, and duck!

The results were anything from "Three mile island meltdown" to "4th of July
Roman Candle". We had one roman candle that lasted for a good minute! Cool!

These things got REAL hot! They usually left a 1/4 inch whole in the bench,
burning through the first layer of plywood.

Children, don't try this at home!

And speaking of vector related stuff, anybody ever put a CD in a microwave for
few seconds? That's cool!

-Zonn
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Received on Wed Feb 7 20:35:13 2001