As a supplier of components, it was often true that it was difficult to
get designed in with a sole sourced device, but that "rule" was violated
over and over again. Sometimes customers were blindsided by design
engineers who somehow sneaked sole sourced devices into their system
(not every company had military level supply channel control), and often
it was simply the case that some critical product function was not
possible without using a sole sourced device. And as you might imagine,
dual sourced devices often turned into sole sourced devices when one of
the suppliers decided to quit making it, or they went out of business.
Before statistical control methods like Six Sigma, lots of suppliers (my
company included) didn't really even have a good handle on whether they
were capable of dependably making a device or not. During my early years
I remember a lot of wafer fab guys "tweaking the process" on an almost
daily basis in reaction to normal process variation ... which of course
actually created greater oscillations in parameter values than if they
had just stayed at their desks. At my company, we literally, and I mean
literally, had to reassign some older engineers in both the wafer fabs
and the assembly factories because they refused to stop "tweaking" until
they actually had done the work to reduce the normal process variations.
73,
Dave AB7E
On 3/13/2020 8:13 PM, Bill Frantz wrote:
Not being a hardware guy I may be a bit confused, but my vague memory
from the 1980s, is that manufacturers of that era would not use a part
that didn't have a second source. This and other posts indicate that
this policy no longer exists. Too bad. It might help with all kinds of
supply problems.
73 Bill AE6JV
On 3/7/20 at 3:15 PM, [email protected] (Alan) wrote:
Some years ago when I worked for HP, I designed a (new at that time)
TI 320C10 DSP chip into a new HP instrument. There was a rather odd
piece of glue logic that I needed to implement the design. I called
up TI and they assured me there were no plans to discontinue the part.
You guessed it. Just as we were ready to go into production the part
was discontinued. I had to scramble to figure out some other means
to perform the function (which meant a PC board turn).
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Bill Frantz | Concurrency is hard. 12 | Periwinkle
(408)348-7900 | out 10 programmers get it | 150 Rivermead Rd #235
www.pwpconsult.com | wrong. - Jeff Frantz | Peterborough, NH 03458
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