It depends on what you develop. In my case of largely discrete analog I have never found a lab that had all the parts I needed. Sometimes they had almost all but that one kind of PIN diode needed to be ordered and that has to happen without red tape.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
We take anything we want out of the stockroom. If it's not in stock, purchasing will get us anything we want overnight... parts or equipment. People are far more expensive than things, and products that are designed can be sold.
My record is 3,200 samples of the MAX9691. But we deserved them.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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Do you have the Skyworks diode sample kit?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
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Of course you do. It's *your* stockroom. ;-) That's the way I see it, too, but the boss wanted to track his precious 0603 resistors.
I thought you had to make the interposer board to substitute something else?
At my PPoE, they didn't make you submit reqs (thankfully)... although of course for most new design efforts other than passive components typically you needed ICs that weren't in stock anyway. To do that... you would go to DigiKey.Com, find the parts you wanted, and then e-mail that to the purchasing lady. She'd then go to DigiKey.Com, re-key those same part numbers, and submit the order. It always drove me nuts that as an engineer you were literally one button click away from getting everything ordered yourself... but instead you had to kill another 5 minutes of your own time and 30 minutes of the purchasing lady's to perform this nonsense.
What was even worse was when parts came in, though: You weren't allowed to have them until they were entered into the big MRP system, which might take a couple of days (if many of them were new). It didn't matter if you told them that you were ordering a bunch of parts strictly for evaluation and could give them an iron-clad guarantee that 90+% of them would *never* be used on the project you were billing to (and this was the usual case); they all had to be entered anyway! Grrr...
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We had to make the adapter board so we could use 9691's in place of the 9690s. Somebody at Maxim asked me how many chips I needed, and I said 3200, and he sent them. I should have said 8000.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
There is a tradeoff here. At a company I used to work for they didn't have a decent part storage system. Putting a prototype together was a lot of work because every part needed to be ordered. When the parts came in they had to be stored in a box which held all the parts of a project. This resulted in a huge stack of boxes with components that belonged to projects long-gone.
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
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I thought it might have been the instance where you had students apply for samples.
Sure, then the boss pays the inventory costs twice. That's sorta where I am now, though. My current job is advanced platform development. We can tap manufacturing but pretty much in full reel quantities only (the Mexicans won't count 0402 resistors for us ;-). For most parts this isn't an issue; they're cheap. We'll probably keep the partial reels for future projects (just have to remember which 10K resistors we used ;-). For the stranger parts we either get samples or get DigiReels (they insist on reels). Since it is advanced platform development, most vendors are happy to send as many parts as we need.
At (you know where), I'd have to send a note to our engineering admin, she'd fill out a paper req, chase down the engineering manager and the owner (or the CFO if he was out of town), *then* hand two copies (of five) to the purchasing lady, who keyed it in...
That end wasn't that bad. The purchase order had to be entered as "filled" but since it wasn't a production PO, the order didn't have to enter any production databases. It usually made it to our desk the same morning.
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No, but maybe I should some day. I have a lot of HP/Avago diodes.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
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iNo, that was a different situation. Maxim wouldn't deliver our parts, but had lots of samples available. So I asked a bunch of people to ask for samples. I paid the students list price.
The long-term fix is to not buy from Maxim.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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The Skyworks kit has pins, schottkies, limiters, and varicaps, lots of them. Cool to have around.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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Unless they know you're going to buy tens of million$ annually, certainly. The opposite end of that spectrum is, of course, is LTC.
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LTC is great. The parts work really well, they are available, and we get visits, samples, support, and pricing deals.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com http://www.highlandtechnology.com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro acquisition and simulation
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Even with any "pricing deals", their stuff is *hugely* expensive. Great for small companies because they support them well (as I said, the polar opposite of Max). Not so great if you're buying a million parts.
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