Electronics > Metrology

3458A Gate array failures + various faults

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Oldtestgear:
In my recent haul of 3458A spares are 6 off 03458-66503 boards. All are marked "Gate Array Failure". Testing one does show this as the failure mode (reported by the DMM). My question is "do these fail regularly" or is this an unfortunate collection of dead boards? Another one is marked "dead ADC".

One of the 3458As I just collected has the dreaded "error 114 rundown convergence error " just to add to the mix of issues I need to work through.  At least I have enough boards to try swapping components once I have done some proper fault finding in the hope of getting one (two would be nice) of these boards working again.

Any comments are most welcome but please do not warn me that these are really difficult & expensive to fix. I know & am prepared to spend many hours to test the spares I bought & repair the faulty 3458A.


Cheers

Phil

Dr. Frank:
Good Gracious!
You really collected a Zombie Army  :palm:

aronake:
A good start would be to try all 03458-66503 (a.k.a. A3) boards and list all error messages here.

The gate array on the 03458-66503 quite rarely fails. The U180 chip very often fails and is often the cause to the convergence errors.

So if you are very lucky you have some (or all) of the boards with working and non drifty U180. You could than either buy a drifty A3 board to replace the U180 on that and may have a working A3 board, or sell the boards you have that have working U180 chips. The buyer would likely want to test the U180 on his A3 board before paying. But if it really works and is not drifty it may be worth 500 to 1000 USD each.

I find it quite likely that if a A3 board have gate array failure it would not go further in the self test could still also have a convergence error. And just because it does not show any error, it does not mean it is fully working. The test on service note 18 give some more indications if it actually works.

Its strange with so many gate array failure boards. Maybe they have been put in a 3458a that had some error that cascaded into the boards. Or maybe it actually is a more convergence error and someone just wrote gate array failure on them.

Echo88:
Id recommend reading through the 3458A repair articles on xdevs: https://xdevs.com/
While i cant help in this case, there are quite a few guys on the xdevs IRC channel having extensive knowledge about 3458a repair.
Happy necromancing  ;D

IanJ:
Hi,

In 2018 I was repairing a 3458A and it had a faulty A3 board, i.e. U180 drift.
I bought a new A3 from Keysight UK, but they allowed trade in of the faulty A3.

Just wondering if you had several A3 drifty boards could you trade them all in for one new one and get a lot better discount?

Ian.

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