Reading this, I thought more about the case: there may be some engineering value in this sort of things, namely a double-check on the manufacturer.

If the manufacturer of the chip is not quite a trusted one (which is what Doug was proposing in one of his posts above), this "test" can be sort of a crude "incoming quality inspection", if performed regularly.

We, for example, use a furnace to burn in our boards (although this is not a desctruction test, of course), after we found out that we had an excessive early failure rate most probably due to mishandling of some parts by the contractor (or the parts supplier).

JW