General > General Technical Chat

Any bets on how long before the component shortage bubble explodes?

<< < (7/11) > >>

peter-h:
Yes; regulators are scarce too. The old LM2936 is disappearing from stocks, unless you buy the version with the enable pin (which far fewer people want) and buy it from Mouser (who charge more than anybody else - how the hell did they become one of the very few TI distributors in the UK??). The MIC5201-5.0YM-TR has the same pinout but the enable pin works backwards, which matters if you are using a 2936 with the enable pin. But there are loads of regulators...

I don't really agree that old components are not used/usable anymore. The 1N4007 of decades ago is now SMT and might be a BYG10M or one of dozens of equivalents. So if an LM358 does the job, use that!

Choosing components, using old ones as far as possible, is an art, which few people have unless they have been at it for a long time and preferably have been responsible for their own company. But if you do it right, you eliminate 99% of headaches.

What has happened, over past few decades, is that manufacturers have focused on unusual parts, with some unusual feature, to entrap less experienced designers into designing-in unusual parts. That's where the money is. It is not in LM358s, or BYG10Ms.

ST are successful because they deliver good value. They do lots of cheap chips. Look at the STLED316 display driver. €0.75 1k+ and that's from Mouser which is always expensive. You get a driver for 6 digits for that. They also do loads of less well known op-amps, comparators and such like. And the 1k price for the 32F417 is about £5.

Simon:
I'm not saying that the old ones are not usable or used, but that those jellybean part numbers are now an ever shrinking portion of the varied mix. If you search 1N4007 you will find few that are really called that but are a spec match. Now for 2N7000, those do not even have pin compatibility between manufacturers while marketed as the same number, the 2N7002 will have as they do that on SMT parts but look carefully at the specs. You get parts like NX7002.... these are the same thing but may have slight variations like in exact gate threshold but overall are interchangeable.

But as you get more complicated than a transistor pin compatibility gets more unlikely unless some sort of silent standard has established itself.

I'm almost suggesting we build in house as we will soon have to hold all of our own stocks and free issuing means you get reals back from a 50 peice build with 5 parts floating in the bag as the tape has to be pulled back by a few parts in the feeder.

ST data sheets give me the heebeegeebees , they read like they are written by lawyers and I found them the worse for getting to the bottom of what a part can actually do. Compare an ST datasheet for a switch mode converter to an LT one...... I'm making a few hundred, I can't spend hours saving pounds on the entire product run of 300 plus worry I misunderstood an intentionally ambiguous datasheet.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: Just_another_Dave on September 26, 2021, 09:37:10 am ---The manufacturer of the regulator that they recommended had assigned the pins differently in each of the regulators of that family and the one that they told us and the required one had their footprint mirrored

--- End quote ---

Grrr. People who design a family of parts with different pinouts within the family should have their toes desoldered.

TheDane:
As soon as the shipping world gets back to normal.... delivery rates will go down and shipping time will decrease - and chips be delivered cheaper and faster.
- and when is that going to happen  :-//

I read this on SlashDot a while ago, with some interesting informative comments:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/06/16/2254236/why-we-are-in-a-shipping-crisis-thats-sparking-shortages

Simon:
Shipping is not the issue, it's the manufacturing.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod