Hi Everyone
I don't want to rip off anyone's creations but I do need to copy FPGAs chips to repair circuit boards.
I have been on my own since 2006. I was mostly repairing scientific instruments when I started out but I am now repairing circuit boards found in these instruments only.
For about 12 to 13 years I have been carefully cutting good FPGAs chips off boards to fix other boards(They end up in sockets). No matter how hard I try, I often damage the traces and pads doing this and I now have a heap of wasted donor boards that are a real loss of money.
Where I live, we are legally allowed to reinstall from a single backup copy. I don't feel that it is illegal for me to copy FPGAs to repair circuit boards as I am not creating additional instances of the software on the chip, I am only doing a kind of backup.
Please help, there are a lot of different companies offering programmers and they claim to support FPGAs but they come with very expensive adapters and the whole process looks very expensive.
I have a BK 844 parallel port based programmer and a Batronix Batupo II.
I can work with small pin count chips with these but I think it's going to be hard with pin counts over 44 pins.
These are the sort of chips I need to backup:
EP1810LC-35
EP7032LC44-7
A1240A-PL84C
A1415A-PL84C
As you can see, they are 15 to 20 years old. The flash memory does not seems to hold well over time and they are a common problem for me.
What do you think I should do?
If I read up on them enough, do you think I could make adapters to work with the existing programmers I have?
If I am not able to find out what sort of memory is inside from documentation, do you think I might be able to read the manufacture's ID from them?
Any hints or tips would be very much appreciated, we don't have a lot of money and this will mean a lot to my family
I don't want to rip off anyone's creations but I do need to copy FPGAs chips to repair circuit boards.
I have been on my own since 2006. I was mostly repairing scientific instruments when I started out but I am now repairing circuit boards found in these instruments only.
For about 12 to 13 years I have been carefully cutting good FPGAs chips off boards to fix other boards(They end up in sockets). No matter how hard I try, I often damage the traces and pads doing this and I now have a heap of wasted donor boards that are a real loss of money.
Where I live, we are legally allowed to reinstall from a single backup copy. I don't feel that it is illegal for me to copy FPGAs to repair circuit boards as I am not creating additional instances of the software on the chip, I am only doing a kind of backup.
Please help, there are a lot of different companies offering programmers and they claim to support FPGAs but they come with very expensive adapters and the whole process looks very expensive.
I have a BK 844 parallel port based programmer and a Batronix Batupo II.
I can work with small pin count chips with these but I think it's going to be hard with pin counts over 44 pins.
These are the sort of chips I need to backup:
EP1810LC-35
EP7032LC44-7
A1240A-PL84C
A1415A-PL84C
As you can see, they are 15 to 20 years old. The flash memory does not seems to hold well over time and they are a common problem for me.
What do you think I should do?
If I read up on them enough, do you think I could make adapters to work with the existing programmers I have?
If I am not able to find out what sort of memory is inside from documentation, do you think I might be able to read the manufacture's ID from them?
Any hints or tips would be very much appreciated, we don't have a lot of money and this will mean a lot to my family
