We should be creating a list of models using these types of chips that essentially make the laptop unrepairable. That would allow those of us in a position to make recommendations to consumers to avoid those models.

I agree Sorin, the technology is going in the wrong direction. It seems like they don't want you to fix devices anymore. Richard from "Learn Electronics Repair" channel has a new video where he had a weird problem with a laptop which he couldn't repair. He mentioned you in his video and said you inspired him to start his channel. I want to thank you Sorin for inspiring Richard. I watch both channels because they are the best two electronics learning channels on KZfaq.

it makes sense to add more SOC (system on chip) components since they are very cheap this days and starts preparing the times when components are going to not be replaceable since they contain id numbers, so only the manufacturer can fix the broken product, but they will not do it since they make more money selling you a new one that will broke as well after a set time. Planned obsolescence is the name of the game, they want us to own nothing but rent everything from them. Apple from my understanding already does it, so you can't replace components from one Iphone to another since each component has a serial number that is checked by the processor and if it sees that the component is different it will not start.

Never underestimate the programers ability to create bugs. Updating the driver may have updated the firmware for the SOC Power Management. See if you can track down the update that the customer did and hopefully the manufacturer discloses a changelog etc. Also assume there may be a 'safemode' charging mode for when the laptop is stored long term pre retail. I have noticed that the Asus Zenbook out the box ignores the power button and switches on automatically when the charger is connected for the first time.

I had a Lenovo E470 that did something like that, after a BIOS update. I did go into the BIOS and setup so that it was possible to downgrade the BIOS. Then I downgraded BIOS from 2.07 to 2.06 - and the problem was solved. Now the charger is working consistently.

Following in Apple's footsteps. You have to go back to manufacturer. Not only proprietary software but also password protection to prevent copying ... have heard about this happening. Samsung actually uses software that can block/brick their TV's. They are trying to force repairs only by an authorized source.

SORIN ! This is your best video I've seen ! You didn't do anything, only discussed how you diagnosed the problem. VERY INTERESTING

Don’t worry about these difficult repairs Sorin. Just turn it off and back on again this usually works. Give it a try . good luck 💪

Very interesting! Thank you Sorin!

Sharing your knowledge is a great help, but the way you explain is your most valuable skill in my humble opinion. Thanks Sorin.

I like watching your investigation and I appreciate your thought process as it is logical.

Awesome video, and good explanation 👍

Yes, multiple models are coming with SoC as PMIC like the latest Intel MacBook's and the new ones. You could try the suggested solution below, ME Partition cleaning in the SPI programming. I had one wich turned on the CPU without fan and was consuming like 800mA on VCC_Core while injecting voltage, multiple chips were showing high temperatures, turned out to be a bad SPI.

Liked this video a lot txt enjoyed every single second of it

In this type of repair I think oscilloscope are needed. While You couldn't see source of that 0,4 voltage, You can see is there is type of communication (that prove that IC's working fine) or needless pulses, that should not suppose to be.

Clip a 8pin probe to the Memory chip and verify that you can read it. Connect KIT PSOC MINIPROG4 to the SWD pins of the PMIC and see if the PMIC is talking. Thank you for the great videos!

Hi Sorin, if customer mentioned what driver it was, you may be able to find flash content in this driver and compare with content in chip. Next step would be to find older version of driver and take older version of flash content from it. It all depends on how driver was prepared and if you can extract information from it.

Thanks 👍

interesting video,learned a lot......thanks for sharing.

yes sorin i agree with you..

i am a embedded programmer and it is always a good practice using a pmic with an low power M0 coprocessor. I am not surprised at 05:00 considering Cypress portfolio.

good one sir very informative video

شكرا لك اعانك الله

Out of all comments, I think being able to read the 1mb spi flash and saving it with the 8 pin clip is a start. Then reflashing the earlier bios on the main one instead of the one you did flash. Idk if you flashed the newest one or the one before that.

Ty for show this eror cool

it's very possible that the firmware of the usb-c charger ic or ec is faulty. there are possibilities to flash those chips over the ccg interface (pd controller), but u will need an adaptor. infineon is selling those controller flash boards (but it's not that simple). but maybe there is a chance that replacing this chips will result in a reflash of the ccg interface via the bios or reflashing the bios will result in a self reflash of the flash rom inside the pd and/or ec. but for this procedure u need at least some power from the battery. i don't think the dedicated bios is for the pd firmware but for thunderbolt (but maybe i'm wrong. in this case clear the bios on the 1 mbit rom ic)...

I would check voltage with oscilloscope on charging port at the moment of pressing a power button.

Most chips that have internal firmware, have a painted dot,like from nail polish.Ofc a chip that small won't have it,but whenever I encounter such chips,unless I can extract a working one from another board,it's game over...

This reminds me of all the hassle the macbook repair community has since 2016, when Apple decided to use undocumented CD3215 (and later CD3217) from TI, which you can't officially buy. There is one per USB-C/Thunderbolt port, and each two CD321X share a ROM chip. I think the power sequence they implement is only community documented since 1 or 2 years now. Apple clearly has slowed down non-official shops with this move, but they haven't stopped us

Many times driver updates include firmware updates, and this may be a victim of that.

I'd suggest to charge manually battery (or put another one) power the pc on without ssd, reset and after flash bios (sometimes in bios option it's also possible to allow downgrade), hoping it flash also Pmic software

Hi Sorin. Lenovo also has software that controls battery charging for battery saving that laptops are always on charge. But it's not working while system is off and it can't be because when it's off disk drive is not reachable and no one can fix it in that case. so the problem is not this software I think. My guess is there is another component that is lowering 3.3 volt when it's try to start laptop. When laptop starting IO chip is giving power to other chips like sound chip and wireless chip e.g.. if there is short for example sound chip when it's enabled and getting power from 3.3 line it will lower the voltage. So if there is something that taking too much current power supply will work harder and it will heat up. Heating up is not always means fault is there. You know it I'm sure about that. Like a resistor. If there is too much load other side of a resistor, resistor will get hot because something is getting too much current. BTW changing the USB controller chip probably can't fix the issue because chip has flash memory inside that stores functions definition program in it. So it should need to be programmed before changing. Probably USB controllers bios chip is storing only settings for chip.

Finally my man is in

Maybe you can try erase pmic bios chip, and let it empty. Maybe pmic will boot into recovery mode, and waiting for i/o chip to reprogram pmic bios, right now we don't know how pmic bios is being program by driver package. Usually if we upgrade the firmware/bios, pc need to be restarted, in order to complete bios installation. Maybe that pmic bios is using the same method. You might need to reflash the main bios to the older version. Newer bios might contain faulty code in it.

May be check the input voltage of the 6A 3.3 driver input: may be the battery voltage is converted to 12 volt by one large voltage regulator (apple style design) but may be if there is only 3.3v required the 6A 3.3 gets 3.3v as an input voltage? Suppose later on the common voltage rail is than 12v or your typical 19v that in that case the coil upper mosfet is shorted which would instantly destroy the cpu pch: the only way to prevent that is to open the lower mosfet also to drain the sorted upper mosfet to ground and hoping for the best. It is a wild stab.

this is a something like on dell servers. Before start server, at first starts idrac small server, witch is control a base server.

Charge the battery with the external battery charger that you have,turn the laptop on and install the ME firmware update package .

Thanks, very interesting situation. Perhaps things are simpler than you think???

If the bios supports both UEFI and legacy - in a way low/high complex code size, then looking at the EZ-PD CCG5 which has 128kb internal flash, could it be possible that the PM chip boots from its internal flash, and then loads whatever else it needs from external flash? - and if so, would it boot/work if the external flash is 'removed', ie not accessible - so the EZ-PD boots into a safe-mode?

Don't show Louis Rossmann this video,he'll have a flippin fit 😬

I thought it was an issue when I only saw 5V off the USB C input. It should start off @ 5V but jump to 18V to indicate normal charging of internal battery/computer. I can see more issues with USB C for charging and providing power to computers now.

Power management technology, makes sense when battery life of modern PCs is a key strategy for consumer electronics

I had a newer dell a user said it was blue screening randomly , it could be hours or it could happen constantly the user let it update to windows 11 and did not tell me that when she brought it in , I tried all sorts of things trying to figure out what was going on .. I called the owner and asked if anything change at all when this started and come to find out she said it updated the day before. I started in safe mode and did a restore a week back and it ran perfect after that

Mr Sorin! The driver created the issue so full charge the battery on bench power supply,start windows that you say it works and install the olders drivers that worked. Probably this is a driver like tpm or power management engine or someting like that.

Well if it was working from battery only after the driver got installed, could you not charge the battery and then uninstall the driver that was installed or revert it back to original using roll back driver? I've typed this before watching all of the video.

You can run Doom inside the charge controller while charging the battery, awesome

Also if you can show the chips Identification marking on the chip i could look for the manufacture and see what i can find there to help.

I've got a samsung with that same cypd5225 chip coming back in a few weeks to get the cypd5225 chip replaced. I'm very interested in pulling the data off that 1MB bios and seeing what's there

It is the same circuit like the lenovo L580, L590 and L15, the PD chip has the firmware on a 1 megabit chip, I have fixed a ton of them, very tricky ones. I'll tell you more, if the bios gets corrupted the replacement bios needs to have the same signing as the EC chip firmware, otherwise the computer won't even turn on, it's like it's dead but all voltages are there.

Sorin, Richard at Learn Electronics Repair gave you a shout out and asked for your guidance in his latest YT upload.

Maybe the chip software is up-gradable? That is why there is a processor and external memory? Asus might have a program for to run a software upgrade?

i can obtain the schematic & boardview from internal source. but it will be encrypt & open only by special version of boardviewer.

If the chip has corrupted fw, can you just delete it and format it. If its empty i assume there will be backup somewhere and bios should try and recover it to factory settings?

Depends how much the laptop is worth it you could use a arduino as a man in the middle between the enable signals. I once replaced an entire mcu with self written arduino software to control a motor, leds and switches. It is possible to fix it 😅

Wondering if it's like the old Samsung laptops with split bios over two chips, would it be possible to fool it with a duplicate copy of the bios you did copy and put it on another bios chip?

there is always on 3.3 can help make it enable signal to test

Well if it was working from battery only after the driver got installed, could you not charge the battery and then uninstall the driver

The 'great' thing about that progress is that you need the flash software when you replace Chip, which you do not get. So it's getting more and more unrepairable.

I'm not an expert on laptops, much less on this problem in particular, so with my limited knowledge, what I would do is try to replicate the conditions in which the laptop turned on, and research from there.

I was wondering if it was the capacitors around the chip maybe one of the is only half working.

some configuration in bios like disable quick start or something

Sorin, Is it possible to hack the 3.3 and get the laptop to power up and then just reinstall manufacture drivers and see if it will re-write the corrupted chip software?

If the driver fuck up the software of power management chip it means tha the driver contain a software update. So what are you looking for it's probably within the driver package. Download the content of the chip in order to check the initial data .... then it's possibile to look for it in the sys/exe/etc of the driver package.

Is the chip marked PU602? I have a Lenovo here M2XL3 motherboard 2018 laptop. There is no voltage on the battery . Looks similar.

Sorin, where do you get your clear glue sticks? thankyou.

The Atmel 16u2 is micro that is a serial to USB controller. It's been used on Arduino's for ages.

Could it be that the user run the Intel Management Engine driver? I think this driver also updates the Intel Management Engine firmware automatically.

''you will own nothing and you will be happy!'' Future will be one piece integrated cristal bowl that will predict you that the circuit is predicting that,

Lets goooo !

Hi. I have the same problem with a different Asus laptop. A customer spilled a liquid on it and now because of that small piece of information missing I can't fix the board ... they are new laptops. It's been nearly a year and I haven't found the board.

Throw in a 'live linux' flash drive and start it up, if it comes on, it's not a hardware problem, if it doesn't, must be software issue, at least that's what I would try first. Customer needs to bitch at the software/driver maker. Oh, and excellent video Sorin, I was able to follow you through every step, you explained it well!

What name you have in discord?? Tnx for your videos😁

what software did they install ??????

I HAVE NO COMPUTER SKILLS, BUT CAN THE DRIVER THE CUSTOMER INSTALLED BE UNINSTALLED, OR COULD YOU RESTORE THE OS TO A PREVIOUS version when the pc worked? (sorry about the caps, I hit cap lock by mistake) Thank you, you're the best.

an analog guy in a digital world. 🤗

please update if anything changes

Zenbook 13 ux325e and ux325ea is same baterry bro?

But if you don't find the contents of the SPI flash for the power management chip with the CPU. So, assuming that it was a coincidence that the laptop went wrong during the installation of some driver, it could be some unstable probably one bit of the mentioned SPI flash and maybe you will try cooling spray or read the content of the SPI flash at 3V and 3.6V via chip programmer to compare whether there's no difference, because that's how it's normally done if no one has published the contents of this memory before you. The second variant is that the customer has upgraded the bios and part of the bios upgrade is also the upgrade of the spi memory content for the power management chip. Or is there a driver in Windows that affects the power management chip? And from what I've read, most of the comments here not make logical sense :)

The specification for the chip that is getting hot says that it has “Over Temperature Protection”. The data sheet for the suffix A version says Over Temperature Protection with Auto Reset. Could the dropping of the 3.3v after a second or two be due to this? Naturally, it doesn’t explain why the chip is getting hot, it just complicates finding out why? If anyone has already commented on this point my apology.

Hello Sir can you share your Bios and PMC Bios files .

i see absolutely no problem here. It is not programmed chip you have no firmware to, it is not a chip you need cypress evaluation board to flash, just a plain 3v reg, which is obviously shorted by some consumers somewhere below the power sequence.

Сорін, схоже що драйвер, який встановив клієнт містив якусь прошивку для цього чіпу живлення. Можливо, якщо підзарядити батарею за допомогою твого обладнання, завантажитися до ОС і встановити коректний драйвер з сайту виробника, то цим самим відновиться прошивка цього чіпу живлення. Я думаю це варто спробувати зробити.

Yay my 12 Y.O garbage laptop who I paid 40$ for it still works and I do not want to buy a new laptop because I like this one more then the new once.

Ask the customer for the driver file used. From there check bin to see if it's flashable directly, be it or an older version that was known to work. Longshot and seems less likely these days but many can still be flashed directly.

#righttorepair

Hi Sorin please check Compal_LA-J191P schematic. This is having same chip

Very interesting so they can kill youre laptop remote welcome 2023 . Look out for Chip readers its another world but they won't let you repair anymore. Best video this year 😃

Software issue after installing a driver you say? Won't that just reset when taking out cmos battery, and all other power sources, then remove all peripherals like ram (if possible) pressing power button 30 seconds after that, and leave it like that for a day (or two)? 7:31 "speak" not "spoke" in this context, someone correct me if i am wrong, ............or too nit-picky.

Hello Sorin, I have that working board, I'm in Uganda. I don't know how I can help you. But thank you for the video, the job though one.

they made sure that right to repair is not going to happen any more lol

Maybe issue is corrupted bios.

i suggest to go forward within data recovery or graphics card repair cause these are the future of repair

if anyone have that same laptop to read dump of that bios chip and maybe you can try to flash it.

Wish I could send a photo

Hi Sorin. you can try to erase this chip. maybe the laptop will start. make a backup first (-;

Isn't it a solution to enable the chip manually to turn the laptop temporarily and roll back that damn driver?

Have you tried to inject 3.3V where you had 0.4V? I'd build an additional charge circuit and run a laptop this way ;). Would be cheaper for the customer, and still fully functional ;).

try getting the laptop on, then do full firmware update with official asus tool

unbelievable........

The manufacturers can now break hardware using software. Programmed obsolescense