Hi,
We are using the DS250DF410 in multiple designs, and we've noticed a strange heating issue with some of the chips. For example, on one of our PCB, there are 4 instances of the DS250DF410. We manufactured 3 pieces of this PCB, so we have a total number of 12 DS250DF410.
Out of these only 9 were working correctly, the other 3 were not working properly. (One PCB was 100% fine, the other two PCB had 1 or 2 faulty chips.) (Abnormally hot die temperature, not responding on I2C bus, pulling down constantly the I2C bus.)
We thought it was a manufacturing error, so we've replaced the 3 chips with new ones. The new chips are working fine indeed, but now the other chips (which were working fine) seems to be faulty. (The same issue: heating up, I2C error.) These chips were not heated during the repairment process, so it's definitely not soldering issue.
Do you have any suggestion what can cause the chip failure? Could this be an ESD issue? If so, do you have any recommendation?
Here I attach photo taken with thermal camera. You can see that the two middle DS250DF410 are heating up to about 70°C, while the leftmost and rightmost one are about 30-40 °C. (This photo was taken without any network traffic, and the default state of the retimers. Also usually we use heatsink, but we removed it now to see the heating issue more clearly.)