MCU: ATTiny13
I noticed this after trying to debug why pushing my switch (connected via R2, a 507kOhm pulldown resistor) makes the LED dimmer while depressed. The switch was powered by the same supply line as the Vcc input to the microcontroller.
Upon disconnecting the Vcc input (Pin 8), I noticed that the LED was still lit when the switch was depressed. If I removed a connection from the ground pin 4, the LED still lit up, but less brighter.
The circuit below represents what I observed. The switch is removed to simplify the problem:
Why does this happen, and how can I stop it? It is interfering with the output when the button is depressed.
Here is a picture of the circuit on a breadboard. The supply line (5V is the red wire, Ground is black):
Best Answer
Inputs of many modern CMOS devices have ESD protection diodes from the I/O pins to the supply rails, which hope to divert transient overvoltages to the supply before they cause damage.
A side effect of this is that the chip can, at least to a degree be powered through an I/O pin, once the pin rises enough against the (unsupplied) supply to forward bias the diode. Even in technologies without explicit protection diodes, it could happen to a degree, though often resulted in very unreliable operation (classic mistake - forget to power a chip and see it "sort of" work - I did it myself with an SPI flash this past January that somehow never got a ground, and would provide expected responses right up until I tried to write flash locations).
Generally you do not want to power a chip this way - it is outside the absolute maximum ratings, and the protection diode may not be sized to carry the full operating current. You do see it at times though, both in intentional experiments, such as an RF-powered ATTiny RFID tag emulator experiment, or accidentally in cases such as trying to measure power consumption of a sleeping MCU and having it actually draw power from your serial debug port rather than the supply you are trying to measure.