Comment by megous

If it's a proper devkit it should have accessible and documented test points for all voltage rails and should have come with a complete schematic. It should be possible to go through them with a voltmeter or oscilloscope and see if everything looks ok.

Given the symptoms (random crashes not right away at boot), and given that qcom is anal about secure boot, my guess is that it's unlikely that it's a firmware (in SPI-NOR or wherever) corruption that initially caused this. Firmware is checked each boot.

Might be as simple as degraded capacitor, or something similar.

And I can imagine that it's not hard to destroy this kind of HW physically with a SW update. PMICs can often produce voltages way higher than Vmax of connected components. But it's unlikely that if bug like that happened, that it would only affect one devkit out there, and not a whole range of devices.