Please stop releasing new components!

You have to consider the benefit of a new component versus the hassle to make use of it. And in the end does it solve/improve _your_ problem solution. If not then why not just continue with the current one .. ?

But you are helping to drive the development of new components by using them. Old ones are better understood, cheaper, easier to source, and possibly even more reliable. The question is not whether you can remain competitive by using old technology, it is whether you can remain competitive in spite of the hidden costs of adopting new technology.

-- Joe Legris

It may also be a question of how often to update. Maybe not every new chip deserves adoption.

It all depends what you are doing. For the low volume production stuff that I've done for most of my career, we didn't use new components until they were being stocked by Farnell or some other broad-line distributor.

There were exceptions, where a new component offered a dramatic improvement in performance that translated directly into a user-perceptible improvment in utility - Gigiabit Logic's GaAs logic comes to mind - but management would have nightmares about suppliers and second sourcing, and needed a lot of time-consuming hand-holding.

Sounds like a kid in a candy factory complaining about how hard it is to choose.

John

one

as I

next

I am redesigning a ten year old board and several of its key components are obsolete now. At the time the board was more or less top notch but compared to todays standards it has middle of the road specs. And boy are there many possibilities for replacing those obsolete parts.

--DF

Is it too proprietary to post a schematic?

The group can probably pick "golden regular" components for you.

...Jim Thompson

What, you mean there's better parts than 2N2222's and 555 timers? :-)

To some extent it's exciting to be in a business where the components are changing (not necessarily advancing!) all the time.

To a larger extent it is satisfying to know that you did an original design with components that are not "new" but that your design is better (as measured by some arbitrary price/performance/marking/sales factor maybe) than any preceding one (in its little corner at least).

Even though I work with software all the time in many different capacities, I am VERY GLAD that I am not on the treadmill of buying/updating/installing/reinstalling every new version of software that comes out. I could see how someone viewed the obsoleting/replacement of parts the same way.

At the same time there are computer geeks who glory and revel in every one of Microsoft's expiration-date-dated products :-).

Tim.

Stop using bleeding-edge parts. :-)

Good Luck! Rich

These days, it seems like just about the only new chips coming out are bigger and faster versions of a fairly small handful of chips/families, like general-purpose uCs, FPGAs, DSPs, that sort of thing. Have there been any really _new_ designs lately, where somebody does something nobody's done on one chip before, other than a new processor core for a CPLD or something?

Thanks, Rich

Yeah, advances seem to be mostly quantitative lately, just higher density and better specs. Like

fast logic, down to 40 ps

dense, cheap fpga's

amazing opamps, like GHz parts and zero-drift chopamps

The latest real innovations seem, to me, to be DDS chips and compound-semiconductor RF power stuff. Anything else?

Still, all sorts of stuff can now be put together on a pcb that would have been impossible a few years ago.

John

Hello Jim,

Or suggest redesigns to avoid "golden non-regular" boutique stuff.

next

SiC Semiconductors

Any references/url ..?

(as light travels 1cm/40ps there are interesting apps)

Digital Domain Synthesis?

Guess microelectronics is interesting. Printing circuitboard components would certainly be nice ;)

Give me bipolars, LM339's, LM324's, and 74HC glue logic, and I will design the world ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

And TL08x (generic FET op-amps) and IRL510 and 2N7000 MOSFETs...

There are a lot of chips designed, for which the datasheets are not publically available, presumably because the manufacturer doesn't want to get support questions from more that a dozen or so big customers. Some of these chips might well be interesting if we knew what was in there, but one can only guess based on what the appliance does.

Chris

Do you want to go cheap, or reliable, or fast, or efficient?

Lots of trade-offs...

Hello Jim,

Same here. Except that I'd request a wee dose of CD4000 logic and the occasional 6AU6 :-)