Subject: RE: breathing life into old chips

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri Apr 4 12:38:51 2003

Hi Jules, one of the ways to isolate a heat issues is to find a can of cold
spray (Chemtronics Freeze Spray). They sell them at electronics stores and
places like www.mcmelectronics.com (just searcj for it there). You allow
the fual to start and then selectivespray different parts to cool them
down. If the fault goes away on a particular device then you have your
culprit.

best regards, Steve Thatcher

Original Message:
-----------------
From: Jules Richardson [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 2003 10:04:56 +0100 (BST)
To: [email-masked]
Subject: breathing life into old chips

hi,

this is sort of off-topic as it applies to my TV and not a computer, but I
bet
some of the folks here can offer advice... :)

the microcontroller in the set seems to have developed a fault which only
appears when the set's warm. Tracking down a replacement seems to be easier
said than done as the chip was obviously discontinued a while back (and then
I'd have to worry about the on-board ROM anyway).

At the moment though there's no heatsink on the chip - if I do stick a
heatsink
on it in the hope that it keeps it cool enough to operate, is it still
likely
to fail at a later date anyway? Once a chip's started to exhibit
heat-related
problems is that basically the end of it even if something's done about the
cooling? I figure some of you people will likely know about these things :)

(the chip in question is a ST9293J9B1/AEL for the record, but no infomation
appears to exist on the web or on ST's site for it; wish I could get
pin-outs
to check that it is the chip and not surrounding circuitry that's failing)

cheers!

Jules
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