Brick Insurance

[Tim Flavin]

On 1/30/07, Mitch Bradley <wmb at firmworks.com> wrote:

> We shall take reasonable precautions to reduce the probability of
> reflash-brickage to an acceptable level.  A level of 0 is neither
> achievable nor cost-effective.

Will the production boards have pads or a header that can be used
by an SPI programmer as a last resort?  Shipping one USB based SPI
programmer for each region that gets 10K to 100k laptops may be
a cost-effective way of fixing the small number of bricks created by
than 100% effective measures.  It would also permit recovery from
a disaster caused by someone incorrectly telling a whole classroom
full of students the wrong way to re-flash the laptops.  This would
require disassembling the laptops but it would be an extremely rare
requirement.

I guess the question is it cost effective to put the pads or headers
on if they almost will never be used.