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MCU VDD-GND gets short

Hello

I experienced a bad problem with my micro controller STM32F103RBT6. after many times of working on a board say about 1 month the MCU VDD-GND got short circuited.
After removing the MCU from board I found that VDD_GND pins of MCU are short.
I checked the 3.3V Regulator output and other power sources and found nothing out of operation condition. There was not excessive current consumption or over voltage on IO pins. Now the board is woking with new MCU.
Has any body faced such a problem ever? what makes MCU to break?

Parents
  • Many chips will short-circuit overvoltages (with or without power to VCC) to the VCC. So an upowered processor that gets a voltage on an I/O pin will basically try to power itself from that I/O pin.

    So whenever possible, try to use series resistors on your inputs to limit the amount of current that may flow through the body diodes.

    4700uF is rather huge for a microprocessor supply. The current spikes from a processor might be large but they are very short. So a much smaller capacitor should normally be used directly at the regulator. The datasheet for the regulator will normally recommend suitable capacitors on the input and output of the regulator - the load regulation capability of the regulator is affected by the capacitor size. And then you should have a number of capacitors as close as possible to all the different VCC pins of the different chips to both even the supply voltage to the chips and to reduce the noise radiated from the PCB traces.

Reply
  • Many chips will short-circuit overvoltages (with or without power to VCC) to the VCC. So an upowered processor that gets a voltage on an I/O pin will basically try to power itself from that I/O pin.

    So whenever possible, try to use series resistors on your inputs to limit the amount of current that may flow through the body diodes.

    4700uF is rather huge for a microprocessor supply. The current spikes from a processor might be large but they are very short. So a much smaller capacitor should normally be used directly at the regulator. The datasheet for the regulator will normally recommend suitable capacitors on the input and output of the regulator - the load regulation capability of the regulator is affected by the capacitor size. And then you should have a number of capacitors as close as possible to all the different VCC pins of the different chips to both even the supply voltage to the chips and to reduce the noise radiated from the PCB traces.

Children