Wearing out a PIC FLash

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dknguyen

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Hi. At work here I have a PIC that started responding to a program only halfway for any particular programming. I would have to reprogram the code over and over again into the PIC until the program "stuck". Otherwise it would lock up (due to a modem not responding to it's commands it would seem even though I see signals coming in on the logic analyzer). It seemed to lock up at the same point in the code every time though, and smaller programs would work just fine. The program that I am having problems with is the largest program that is going onto the PIC.

This is a symptom of a failing Flash ROM right? The code seems to work just fine on the other modules.
 
What programmer are you using?, it would be VERY, VERY, VERY unusual to 'wear out' an EEPROM/FLASH chip.

I've got PIC's I've been using for well over ten years - I've never seen, or heard, of any such problems.
 
if I'm having a good day of coding, I might reflash a pic 75-100 during the course of a day (icsp makes it real handy) ... if the pic meets 50% of its 1million write claim, that'll still take me 5000 days to burn out the chip, almost 14 years? could be you've damaged the chip somehow, esd or something. I've got chips that won't program or won't program past a certain address, I just chalk it up to "I goofed" - others constantly fail on certain fuses or weird things like the chip id - I suspect the programmer is at fault here.
 
the programmer may be functioning correctly, but there may just be an issue with its firmware or timings, that cause it trouble programming the chip you're working with.

Nigel's got the best suggestion, try another chip...
 
*I met some PIC’s some of them EEPROM is not working.

*Also I met another PIC which it takes time to settle the clock frequency (4MHz)
So program won’t run well its starting with a low frequency even though I changed the fuse settings.

Did you check the page boundaries?
Do you have any lengthy tables?

Best is to change the PIC & see as earlier mentioned.
 
justDIY said:
if I'm having a good day of coding, I might reflash a pic 75-100 during the course of a day (icsp makes it real handy) ... if the pic meets 50% of its 1million write claim, that'll still take me 5000 days to burn out the chip, almost 14 years?
Click to expand...

Which PIC allows 1 million code reflash?

Datasheet indicate possible 1,000,000 write On EEPROM only.
 
A Pic16f914. What makes me think the PIC failed it was working for the last 2 weeks and all the other modules respond to the same code just fine. I think flash only takes 10k rewrites?
 
I've heard someone say that after many programming cycles they had a similar problem of needing several program cycles to get one to "stick" and they attributed it to write endurance failure.

There are other possibilities though. Electrical supply issues and PGC/PGD ringing/crosstalk can make programming success intermittent. If it was ICSP I'd suspect that. If you placed it in a programming socket on the programmer itself, that generally rules out crosstalk and such but also defective programmers that program inconsistently are hardly unheard of.
 
anti static mat and antistatic floor. though I cant say the same for the chair.
 
I had a dud 18F1320 that now lives in a landfill somewhere..
Only managed to program it twice before it died. All sorts of code corruption and weirdness.
I also have a 12F629 that has been programmed well over 1500 times, and still works perfectly!

Best thing to do with any suspect chip is to bin it, and use a fresh one.
 
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