8TSSOP size standard in chaos now?

Way bigger ones, 29" by 2.2":

A friend of mine has a couple of fat bikes like this:

This is key: When I wear them down I can simply buy any brand of 29" MTB tire and it will fit. Unlike some modern electronics parts.

The downside is that they seem to never last more than 500 miles.

Mountain road bikes, of course.

--sp

Den onsdag den 19. august 2015 kl. 22.50.19 UTC+2 skrev Spehro Pefhany:

that would be called a road bike ;)

they are for making your legs hurt when going up hill, cyclist vs. bike rider:

mountain bike are for breaking your neck going downhill and hitting a tree

-Lasse

How do you deal with the regulatory bodies with different parts? We can't even change a resistor without doing a complete requalification.

We do nothing but high volume (50K-5M/yr, for most boards). If a part goes unobtanium the lawyers would remind the manufacturer of their obligations. The Thai disaster a couple of years ago caused some "interesting times", though. That was a big enough disaster that board spins were a trivial issue.

It has to go through the regular ECO release process. Don't you guys have that?

If you have longterm contracts that's different.

The Thai disaster a couple of years ago caused some

Sometimes it has to be done. If some large part or module goes unobtanium you might have to re-cert the EMC and that can become a real pain.

Sure but it has to be tested to not only the customer's spec and all compliance testing. That may cost tens of thousands of $$ and take months.

Don't leave home without them.

Yes, but that's just a part of the pain. We have to prove to our customer that it's the same board.

Not necessarily. If you you replace a transistor with another transistor, the performance values in the datasheets are close enough to identical and a very knowledgeable engineer determines that this has no impact on specs and compliance it can be released as is. The knowledgeable engineer is key here.

If the sales your are bringing to a manufacturer aren't at least in the high six figures you aren't going to get any.

If the customer pays a premium for insisting on this much bureaucracy then that's ok, it'll become part of a "profit center".

By not testing it, you're taking a risk that the functionality has changed. Our customers won't accept that. It's re-test time.

Six figure sales by manufacturer? That's peanuts. If they don't sign the contracts they get nothing. It's the only way the business can run.

No, it's our loss. There is a thing called "competition".

In most of my cases the customers trust the engineers. If they don't then they must pay a premium to cover testing costs.

Yours maybe but not that of many smaller businesses. There are markets with lesser volume and higher value addition. When you build maybe 1000 units/year and you need one reel of a certian part that lasts more than a year.

Huh? What kind of customers are they?

Trust, but verify. Since they're not paying the testing costs for such bad decisions, they want to see the documentation.

Then buy a reel and stick it on the shelf? You'd better keep that reel in a controlled atmosphere. My last job was like that. We built maybe 1000 units a year. We didn't have the same customer demands, either. Of course it was a higher margin business. While they didn't want to spin a board (and weren't shy about chewing gum manufacturing) they would if there was an issue that couldn't be taken care of any other way. It was pretty rare, though.

Automotive.

A lot of the semiconductor companies are into "copy exact", where they want to approve any change to a product, down to moving a piece of production or test equipment on our floor. They also want us to be able to ship volumes on short notice, and to be willing to halt shipping on instant notice, to take all the risk, to hand over our IP, and to be audited to make sure we aren't actually making a profit.

No thanks.

I point customers to my T&C on the web site. They have the option of explicitly accepting those or not getting their orders filled. These type of buyers are used to buying commodity items where there are many suppliers and they can push to get their JIT terms accepted. They have to buy some things from vendors with more specialized services and know how to push the paper up the food chain to get authorizations. It's not like they *never* buy sole sourced items.

They can demand this of their suppliers. They have the money.

You can refuse the money. Ain't choice great?

Money? One customer gave us an audit spreadsheet to fill out:

Direct parts cost + 5% for purchasing

Direct labor cost + 10% admin

Maybe we'll consider that after they show us the ones that Tektronix and NI and Dell filled out.

They can always go somewhere else for their system controllers. Choice is indeed great.

They can demand whatever they want.

...and you can tell them to go to hell. It's the same with employers. If you don't like their terms, fire 'em.

Exactly. Too bad there is no choice when it comes to government.

In the automotive world this has resulted in rather shoddy quality of some electronics. To the point where I simply (and lots of others) refuse to buy a vehicle that has lots of electronics.

I just had to do that with a client. They wanted me to essentially indemnify their company. So now they'll have to work without me.

:-(

Except for emigration. Works at least for a while, for example until the new place turns socialist.

Some, perhaps. It's a pretty damned harsh environment but the specs are equally tight. I can't say I've had any recent problems with automotive electronics that wasn't software related. ...and that's no different than any other consumer sorts of software.

Fair enough. That's the way it should work. No "meeting of the minds", no contract.

To where, the Moon?

That same company wants us to sign a contract that indemnifies them, worldwide, and makes us liable for all damages that their product might cause. We haven't gotten around to signing it just yet. I suspect that Agilent hasn't either.

It's usually caused by their legal folks while the engineers understand perfectly well why this is a non-starter. IME there is only one strategy in such cases: Don't sign and let them go. Occasionally things really hit the fan afterwards. Then they'll sign anything and dismiss their legal folks opinion. That typically happens once a problem has percolated up to executive level. Things like a hard line stop in production tend to do that very quickly.