Hi, We have a board with a C8051F060, that once in a while, after many power cycles, erases portions of the flash. The erased segments are random but on a full page (512-byte) boundaries. Many times the boot loader is erased preventing the board from coming up at all after a power up.
After many tests we have concluded that random flash erase is happening because the MONEN Pin (Pin 28) is mistakenly tied to GND instead of VDD. This pin is important because we do use the flash for non-volatile data storage, hence the code does read/write/erase the flash. After connecting MONEN to VDD and thousands of power cycles... no more flash corruption.
My question is, as an immidiate solution until we can physically have access to all the boards at our customer sites to make the hardware change, is there a firmware solution for this hardware problem? In other words, is it possible to use any combination of Flash Access Limit or anything in Flash Security Option covered in section 16.3 of the data sheet to protect the code section from being erased, specifically due to power ON/OFF?
The data sheet: www.silabs.com/.../C8051F06x.pdf Thanks.
Thanks! And sorry.