Lets say you have a commercial device you are experimenting with. It has a flash memory chip that cannot be read while in-circuit (I have already tried the clip thing), so you have to de-solder it every time you want to read it, plug it into the socket of the chip programmer, dump the memory, and then re-solder it back onto the PCB, so the device can interact with it.

(I am then doing a diff comparison on the dumps in order to determine how the device's MCU is storing information in the flash chip)

Eventually, after enough heating/cooling cycles, something bad is going to happen to the pads on the PCB. I have ruined a few boards in this way in the past. So I want to minimize the amount of time I am heating it.

I thought "*wouldn't it be great if there were some kind of adapter that I can solder onto the SOIC-8 pad on the PCB, that then connects to an SOIC-8 programming socket, so I can easily remove, read, and reinsert the chip onto the board without soldering*".

But no such thing exists.

So how do most people handle this situation?

[![enter image description here][1]][1]


  [1]: https://i.sstatic.net/Le9Oa.png