Our company used this part in our instruments for more than 10 years without any problem in the past. Recently, at the beginning of 2016, we received a batch of assemblies form the assembly house, which failed 100% when we tried to program the flash inside this IC. The vendor contacted TI and was told that this IC manufactured in 2015 between March to August had quality issue that would make the IC fail to be programmed. Since then, we have requested the assembly house to purchase IC with date code after the afore-mentioned bad quality window. However, we still have excessive failure rate (> 50%) on this part. We even bought this IC through Digikey/Mouser ourselves and replaced the bad IC on the board. The result is 12 failed out of a total of 21 MSC1210Y5 replaced on the circuit board.
We would like TI to revisit the quality/performance of this part. Has there been any changes in operation or specification of this part that we need to know? If anyone also uses this chip, I would appreciate that he/she shares the experience with us.
Thank you very much.