Mike from Mike’s Electric Stuff has a pick and place machine that he uses to assemble some of his projects. A short in the wires going to one of the stepper motors caused one of his motor drivers to fail. When he swapped one of the different drivers in place of the blown one it also blew. Most pick and place users would toss both of them in the bin and look for a replacement. Mike needed to get the machine up and running quickly so he decided to get into the hybrid case and do some looking around. Turns out that the mosfets are quite large and the damaged bond wire was quite obvious. He carefully installed a new external mosfet to replace the one that was blown internally and it seems to work just like new!
