Question for Win Hill

Walmart had them for $0.99. But IMHO their "performance" is the pits.

Most of our CFLs were around $0.70. Philips Marathon. Of the others before that I occasionally opened one after it croaked. No chips in there.

Many of my designs must go the discrete route as well. It's amazing, nowadays you can design a circuit with 50 parts and the complete and tested assy come to about two bucks.

Sweet! I love low cost design.

Will your client sell to third parties? I might have one that could be interested at some point.

The trick to evaluating this scene is to remove all the unusual high-power, high-voltage, high-energy storage, etc., parts from the scene and see what's left and the cost. Some or most of what's left could be integrated. I mean, we know ac-line RFI-filters and dc-dc converter inductors can't be integrated. Neither can 60Hz storage capacitors, if they're required. High-power SCRs, etc., are not good candidates. But lots of other stuff may be.

How does that look in practice? Did you make a SPICE subcircuit with 5 parallel MOSFETs and different, "discrete" gate resistors?

robert

Most spice power MOSFET models have an internal discrete gate resistor, so you can just change that value in each partial paralleled-MOSFET section.

Yes. But then comes the really hard part: Factoring the NRE amortization into the game. Not a big deal for anything that runs in the tens of millions a year but for less than a million the discrete solution often still wins. It is amazing how cheap BJTs and diodes are. Of course, every time you contemplate a FET you'll have to think really hard about whether there is any way to do the circuit with a BJT or two. There have been times where I invested almost an hour of billed time into that because it made sense for the client.

If it has the power device in there. If it's just a controller you can make them cheaper than 20c out of standard parts.

Spehro Pefhany snipped-for-privacy@interlogDOTyou.knowwhat posted to sci.electronics.design:

Somehow i had gotten the impression that they only made 200 mm equipment for the past two decades. Then again i do not know the normal lifetime of such equipment. We may have 2 inch lines still running.