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What is on the sillicon in the upper right corner of the nRF52832?

I have a QFN48 nRF52832, and it's getting hot. I'm looking at it with a thermal camera and there's a hot spot directly under the "N" of the "N52832" that's on the package. I think that would put the hotspot on extreme upper right hand corner of the die itself. If I can figure out what's in that general area, that will tell me where to start looking for problems.

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  • It's a custom board. I have 2, but the other one is misbehaving in other ways. Current consumption is ~80mA into the nRF52832 with the LDO enabled. It's 100mA with the DC-DC converter. The inductors and cap for the DC-DC are on the board, just like the reference design. I loaded the same firmware onto a completely different (but still custom) board, and it draws 3mA. The firmware starts up the DC-DC converter, sets all of the GPIOs as disconnected inputs, and then falls into an infinite loop. It's just running the CPU. I've looked at the bad board under a microscope and under an xray machine. I cannot find any explanation for why the bad board is drawing so much current and why the nRF52 is getting hot. I'm looking at it with a thermal camera and there is a clear hot spot in the upper left corner of the nRF52

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  • It's a custom board. I have 2, but the other one is misbehaving in other ways. Current consumption is ~80mA into the nRF52832 with the LDO enabled. It's 100mA with the DC-DC converter. The inductors and cap for the DC-DC are on the board, just like the reference design. I loaded the same firmware onto a completely different (but still custom) board, and it draws 3mA. The firmware starts up the DC-DC converter, sets all of the GPIOs as disconnected inputs, and then falls into an infinite loop. It's just running the CPU. I've looked at the bad board under a microscope and under an xray machine. I cannot find any explanation for why the bad board is drawing so much current and why the nRF52 is getting hot. I'm looking at it with a thermal camera and there is a clear hot spot in the upper left corner of the nRF52

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