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MSP432P401R: LaunchPad IC getting very hot

MATTHEW LAMPARTER
Prodigy 15 points

Part Number: MSP432P401R

I am a Lab Director for an ECE department, so I have not worked directly with this LaunchPads.  However, I have had two students report similar issues with two LaunchPads.  They tell me that, seemingly randomly, both the MSP432P401R and TM4C129 chips on the LaunchPad started getting extremely hot.

I was not with the students when they reported this behavior, so I am not sure what preceded it.  Certainly one possibility is that they shorted power and ground.  I now have the boards in my possession and I have plugged them in to a USB port (in series with a USB current meter), and with no external devices connected to the LaunchPads the MSP432 IC's do indeed get very hot.  Both boards are drawing over 600 mA.  The TM4C129 is not getting hot on either board.  Both boards are rev 2.1.  Pressing the reset button on the XDS110 side of the board does not seem to reduce the current draw significantly.  All of the on-board jumpers are installed correctly.

I noticed several other forum posts describing a similar issue, but that seemed related to the earlier revision of this board (black soldermask) and it seemed related to a voltage regulator IC or a capacitor:
https://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/msp430/f/166/p/490273/1771014#pi316701=1

There is also this post, which describes behavior similar to what I am seeing.  However, this is from over two years ago, so I suspect it was also the older, pre-production version of this LaunchPad:
https://e2e.ti.com/support/microcontrollers/msp430/f/166/t/453752#pi316701=1

Does anyone have any thoughts beyond the obvious, "Did they tie power to ground?"  Has anyone else experienced this issue with the newer, production, red soldermask boards?

  • 0
    TI__Mastermind 22640 points
    Hello Matthew,

    I haven't noticed this issue on the newer version of the LaunchPad yet. I will find out from my colleagues if they came across such an issue with the latest version.

    The high current consumption could be due to the fact that the device is damaged due to a preceding activity.

    Thanks,
    Sai
  • 0
    TI__Guru 74631 points

    Typically the issue is an EOS related failure. More specifically, if a voltage is applied to a GPIO before the VCC of the device is applied you can back power through the protection circuit and damage it. In the absolute maximum ratings the GPIO voltage is relative to Vcc inorder to prevent this conduction path. I would recommend setting all of the pins as outputs to VCC and see if there are any pins at some intermediate voltage. This will indicate that the protection circuit is damaged and you are dumping current from the VCC rail to ground and this is why it is heating up.

    This will only give you an idea of what the possible preceding event might have been: for example if you are using the ADC to measure a supply and you forget to turn off the supply before removing device power - I have done that a few times.

    Chris

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