[time-nuts] OT- Fixing product by attaching the scope probe
David Forbes
dforbes at dakotacom.net
Wed Nov 28 20:51:24 UTC 2007
Chuck Harris wrote:
> Ah yes! You gotta love it when the test instrument fixes
> the problem ;-)
>
> I recall hearing of a few instruments that had scope probes
> built in to fix strange parasitic problems...
>
> -Chuck Harris
When I designed and debugged VMEbus cards, I would joke about doing that
sometimes when I found that the scope fixed the problem. The joke got
more involved, however, when the board only worked properly with 100
channels of logic analyzer probes connected. Shipping a board with that
much stuff stuck to it might make the customer nervous. So my boss
always made me find the source of the trouble.
We did ship some boards with rows of 150pF SMT capacitors on register
select inputs of an IDT bit-slice ALU due to a die shrink that made the
internal registers get corrupted with fast incoming edges. Talk about
analog solutions to digital problems!
--David Forbes
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