I have a question that I have not seen addressed anywhere: will bus contention between a microcontroller and a peripheral device destroy port I/O?

This is a general question. One possible scenario is where an A/D converter outputs an 8-bit binary value to a microcontroller port that is outputting all 0's. Is this likely to destroy either the outputs of the ADC or the port pins of the microcontroller? If this situation persists for a long time, would it mean certain death to one of the parts?

One of my personal guidelines for design is to not build hardware that is capable of destroying itself.. But I never seriously considered this case. If such a scenario can destroy I/O then I will be much more careful when I write code in the future!

- Lee