Chips get a burned spot in the test?

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thomas00

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Chips draw an abnormal large current and got a burned spot in the test?

During my tset of an ASIC with several circuits on it, I found out that the chip often directly starts to draw a very large current after turning on the power. And the socket and the chip got extremly hot and I clearly saw a small burned spot even on the package of the chip itself.This does not always happen, but it happens quite often. Sometimes during the normal measurement, after I changed cables and switched the supplies, somehow this problem suddenly appears.

Almost all the chips have this problem either at the very beginning of the test or after testing it for a while. And the burned spots are all at exactly the same place of the package. So I suppose one part of a certain circuit gets abnormal large current and is destroyed and generates lots of heat.

Now my question is, why does it happen?
 

It sounds like latch-up. Is it always the same spot? What happens if you cool down the chip?
 
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