We have an industrial controller which uses an 80C32 cpu. The controller has been in production for many many years and is very reliable. Intel has announced that they won't make these chips after next year. Does anyone have a simple suggestion how to just continue with this controller design or is it going to require a re-design with new technology? Thanks in advance for your opinions and advice.
The 'traditional' approach in this situation boils down to a straightforward commercial decision...
"How many more years do you expect to be selling / maintaining this particular controller ?"
If the answer is 'not many' then buy yourself 'enough' of the offending devices to keep you going, and, in the meantime, work on a new design using components which aren't going to go out of production for the forseeable future (however long that might be )
If you are really committed to this particular controller, and don't want to consider re-engineering, then 'simply' buy up as many of the devices as you can lay your hands on. If you're going to do this, then don't hang about - your company won't be the only one in this situation, and the other guys will be also looking to safeguard their businesses. I've seen this situation before - and it's amazing how a part that cost $5 last month can suddenly cost $25 (if you can get them !) this month....
Good luck !
Adrian Suffolk UK
Or, use something different that's the same...
You should look at the time horizon that you want to do the support for your design, and for the future market for your device.
If making a new updated design is going to be very expensive in relation to the return, I would work out a projection of how many of these chips to buy, and stock up on them.
This situation is very normal in this industry.
Jerry G. ======
ee_design wrote:
You really should have *cross-posted* this question to all the relevant groups so that the answers could be seen by all.
For the benefit of posters here - the 80C31/2 series is highly 'second-sourced' and in any event Intel don't even sell very many of them anymore.
Good second sources are typically Philips and Atmel. MHS and OKI also used to make them ( amongst others ) and many variants are available from multiple vendors including versions with faster clocks and faster machine cycles.
It's estimated that the 8031 family of MCUs represents 50% of all MCUs sold worldwide last time I checked.
Graham
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