The actual reason for my fear of these components is that
test equipemt, especially high quality one like tektronix or agilent,
always was an investment for many years - who is not happy about
his working Tek535 on a cold winter day? Recently there came up
relatively many of high end oscilloscopes (545xx) on eBay with
comments like "out of service", "agilent refused to repair",
"not serviceable". Since I own such a device, I suspect the
ALTERA EPM5128 or the soldered in flash memory beeing the problem.
Honestly speaking I was shocked that HP/agilent oscilloscopes are
"not servicable" only a couple of years after they have been
discontiuned :-(

Thanks god, my 54542a still works...


This has been a problem for quite a while now, a number of very good Tek
scopes for example use custom IC's that run hot and are unobtainable.