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Interrupts: can be lost?

Almost every serious product needs some level of certification. And for almost every serious product, there will be multiple critical parts for which there is no drop-in second source with identical characteristics. And even when second sources exist, there will be no more guarantees that they will be produced longer than the original part. And for almost every serious product, the engineering costs for re-design and re-certification are high if parts do end up needing replaced.

You are not in some special situation here - this is life for electronics designers and producers the world over. There are all sorts of ways to limit the risks and limit the resulting costs. Requiring "second source" for one component is one possibility - but it is rarely a good idea overall. It's better to run the risk of having to pay some extra costs for a re-certification ten years in the future than to be guaranteed to pay extra costs now for trying to design the product with a hopelessly outdated device.

But one thing you can be sure of - there are no fixed answers that always apply. You deal with each project in the way that works best for that project.

And if you are a good designer and project partner, when a customer makes a requirement that you think is likely to be a bad idea, you question it. You challenge it. You try to find alternative solutions that will give a better result overall for the project. (It's unlikely, however, that the best alternative is "fire the manager" !) The customer is /not/ always right - at least not at first. As an electronics designer and consultant, it is part of your job to tell the customer if you don't think they are asking for the right thing - if you give them what they ask for, not what they want or need, then you are doing them a disservice. Of course this will mean that sometimes a customer will move on and find an alternative supplier. That's part of the job too.

Sure - and what percentage of electronics development projects do these account for? Rounded to the nearest percent, nothing. (And I've worked on a few safety-related projects - second source was never an issue.)

Reply to
David Brown
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Everything you posted is irrelevant, immaterial or tangential to the issue of second sources. So, nothing to reply to.

Enjoy.

--

  Rick C. 

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Reply to
Rick C

And sometimes the customer is VERY important, spending more than the next several possible customers for this sort of product combined (and the power to prevent you from selling to some of them). If you complain to loudly that they don't really know what they want, they are more than willing to find other suppliers, and if you make them too upset, they might black list you, effectively making you change your line of business.

There ARE good reasons to spec parts to have second sources (and note, second source does NOT mean someone else has made a knock off clone of the part, for this purpose, second source tends to mean the company has an official second source agreement with the other firm.

Reply to
Richard Damon

Of course - as I said, there is no single right answer. Occasionally it even makes sense to spend time, effort on money working on something that you know is fruitless, because it is important for keeping the customer. And obviously you are more diplomatic in how you put things to the customer than one might be in a newsgroup!

We have had cases of a customer come to us with concrete requirements, have us tell them that the requirements are not realistic but we can help them with alternative ideas and solutions, and they have chosen to go away and find another development company. Then after having wasted significant time and money with another company that tried and failed to fulfil the original requirements, they came back to us to find out how to get what they actually need, not what they asked for.

Oh, sure. And occasionally those reasons might be good enough to make it worth doing. But usually it's just wishful thinking on the part of the customer. After all, from the customer's viewpoint, they have good reason for requiring the device to be small, cheap, long-lasting, suitable for production anywhere, and so on - that doesn't mean the requirements are realistic or the best choice for the project as a whole. Helping the customer get the requirements right is part of the job.

Reply to
David Brown

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