[General] Pin Endurance of devices

[jstamour802]

Is it possible to "wear down" a pin on a device by repeatedly writing high or low levels? Not read/write endurance of say an eeprom, but physically toggling a pin high or low.

Specifically, I want to send a reset/presence pulse to a one-wire EEPROM rapidly to determine if the one-wire device was disconnected or not, and I want to do this as fast as possible to prevent damage to a load if it is disconnected. I was thinking every 10msec or so?

If this EEPROM is connected forever and I do a reset-pulse every 10msec, would that potentially wear down the pin on the one-wire device? Is there such thing as "writing a pin too many times?"

 

[betwixt]

Everything wears out eventually but you should be good for several trillion pulses before you see problems. I've got pins toggling 30,000,000,000 times a second all day and they are still working fine after several years!

It's different with memory cells but ordinary signalling pins are OK.

Brian.