Repairing a faulty Firewire Port
LAST RESORT : CHANGE THE PHY !
Beware, this hack is extremely delicate and is only advisable to those of you with solid soldering experience. If not properly executed, you can ultimately FRY THE WHOLE LOGIC BOARD, or cause other serious problems. You have been warned .
Step 1. Locate the PHY chip on the logic board.
The chip is located very close to the FireWire connectors, and can be on either side of the logic board. Here are 3 pictured examples : ( there are 2 chip suppliers)
- Agere / Lucent. Those are usually in iMacs, they carry the reference number FW802
-Texas Instruments. Mostly found in all other Macs and peripherals. The chips are labelled TSB41ABx, where x is the number of devices the chip can handle. (most of the time, TSB41AB1 are in laptops and TSB41AB2 in desktops)
PHY TSB41AB1 (1 port) from an iBook 366 Clamshell
TSB41AB2 (2 ports) from an Oxford 911 FireWire/IDE bridge's PHY
Agere PHY from an iMac DV (2 ports)
Step 2. Get a brand new PHY
Those chips are indeed impossible to find in electronics stores, however, Texas Instruments offers the possibility to order chip samples on-line. You just need to sign up and order what you need.
-do not abuse from this service!!! TI is one of the only chip maker offering such a great service. So be responsible and only order the things that you need. If something is free it does not mean that you can just order the whole shebang-
examples of samples from TI :
Regarding Agere/Lucent PHY chips, unfortunately there is no easy way to get them at the moment, and of course TI chips are not pin-to-pin compatible with Agere/Lucent chips... sorry.
Although it might be possible to find an internet shop that sells those in small quantities...
