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Clive Sinclair - what a cheap skate!

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floobydust:
The 1975 Sinclair Black Watch was an early, huge product failure. The batteries going dead, drifting oscillator, money-back guarantee... a loss of USD$3.4M (£2.6M) in 2019 dollars. OUCH.
I'm not sure if Sinclair just didn't listen to the engineers or he pushed them so hard, usually it's that they don't want to poke the bear and tell him flat out it's not ready yet. Dreamers don't worry too much about things not working.

I remember W. Edwards Deming teaching "Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product.  As Harold F. Dodge said, “You cannot inspect quality into a product.”

PlainName:

--- Quote --- It is not inconceivable to produce a widget which contains out of spec components and still work.
--- End quote ---

Unless we are talking Aliexpress cheapies, in which case they probably won't continue working even when they work.

Some double-standards going on here, methinks. Surely a product that has failed some test may fail further tests in the future - it is a faulty product, after all. But it's OK for Sinclair and the likes to use these in the name of a cheap BoM, but it's not okay for a hobby guy to use similar from a Alibay vendor.

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on September 07, 2020, 11:56:56 pm ---
--- Quote --- It is not inconceivable to produce a widget which contains out of spec components and still work.
--- End quote ---

Unless we are talking Aliexpress cheapies, in which case they probably won't continue working even when they work.

Some double-standards going on here, methinks. Surely a product that has failed some test may fail further tests in the future - it is a faulty product, after all. But it's OK for Sinclair and the likes to use these in the name of a cheap BoM, but it's not okay for a hobby guy to use similar from a Alibay vendor.

--- End quote ---

I couldn't locate where you got the quote from, but years ago, we were taught that designs which relied upon strict adherence to component specs were poor engineering.

For instance, that is why amplifiers have negative feedback loops around them.
Whilst it is no doubt possible to design an amplifier using carefully selected components which will meet all required specifications, it is just plain easier to design one that isn't "touchy" about component specs.

The same thing applies to other electronic devices.
Mechanical stuff is not quite as forgiving!

Berni:

--- Quote from: dunkemhigh on September 07, 2020, 11:56:56 pm ---
--- Quote --- It is not inconceivable to produce a widget which contains out of spec components and still work.
--- End quote ---
Unless we are talking Aliexpress cheapies, in which case they probably won't continue working even when they work.

Some double-standards going on here, methinks. Surely a product that has failed some test may fail further tests in the future - it is a faulty product, after all. But it's OK for Sinclair and the likes to use these in the name of a cheap BoM, but it's not okay for a hobby guy to use similar from a Alibay vendor.

--- End quote ---

I would guess that the only thing that was likely wrong with these Sinclairs trash picked chips is that one or two bits in those chips ware dead (stuck at 1 or stuck at 0) due to a lithography error that didn't quite connect two transistors properly or shorted something out. The rest of the chip is fine. If there are any other serious faults with the chip such as drawing 2x the supply current than normal then the test would also detect it and toss it out.

Yes no test is 100% guaranteed to find all issues. There might be 'zombie' chips that work fine in the test but then after some field wear an tear for example a bond wire that was just barely holding on lets go. But this is really rare. The tests are typically run at the extremes of the operating range. So the chip might be run below and above the datasheet speced supply voltage spec to make sure it works there too, the chip might be fed slow rise time signals to try coax and metastability faults to show up. The chip might be overclocked and measured at what point it craps out...etc So all this makes sure that the chip operates fine even beyond what the datasheet claims it can work at, so this way they can be pretty darn certain that it also works within the datasheet specs. Some of the fancy more expensive chips for high reliability applications might even be thermal cycled and tested at temperature extremes.

Its just that back in Clives days the semiconductor industry was not designing in tricks to make the chips more fault tolerant. So if a single transistor was dead the whole chip was considered trash. Back when chips has 10s of thousands of transistors this was perfectly fine. But as they got into the milions of transistors it simply was not possible to keep the yield up. So it started making more financial sense to make the chip slightly larger by adding redundant parts in order to be able to "fix" otherwise dead chips by blowing OTP fuses that disable the broken parts. Clive simply beat them to the idea by a fair few years.

SiliconWizard:

--- Quote from: floobydust on September 06, 2020, 07:36:35 pm ---The 1975 Sinclair Black Watch was an early, huge product failure. The batteries going dead, drifting oscillator, money-back guarantee... a loss of USD$3.4M (£2.6M) in 2019 dollars. OUCH.
I'm not sure if Sinclair just didn't listen to the engineers or he pushed them so hard, usually it's that they don't want to poke the bear and tell him flat out it's not ready yet. Dreamers don't worry too much about things not working.

I remember W. Edwards Deming teaching "Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product.  As Harold F. Dodge said, “You cannot inspect quality into a product.”

--- End quote ---

Yep, this one is a good example of bad engineering.

I've heard stories about the development of the ZX80/81/Spectrum and the QL, but not of this watch, so I can't really tell how things were at Sinclair back then. It's probably a mix of Sinclair pushing too hard and engineers not willing/or unable to step foot and say "this isn't gonna work". What we don't even know is whether Sinclair himself was aware of the limitations BEFORE releasing the product. I frankly can't believe the engineering team DIDN'T. Sure, testing alone is not going to guarantee that the product is reliable, but come on. The two main problems: oscillator drift and power consumption were definitely easy to test, and some basic testing was definitely enough to figure out the product was not going to meet specs. And of course, it was also easy to figure it out from the design itself without any kind of testing. So either engineers LIED, or (more likely) Sinclair's management decided to release the product in spite of its shortcomings (something which Sinclair kept being famous for...), hoping the issues would be solved in time, the market already "hooked", and that they could release fixes later. They kept doing this till their last product (which I believe was the QL but  I'm not sure?) This sounds bad, but hey, do many companies these days not do this? We could go as far as saying that Sinclair was one of the first companies that came up with the "minimum viable product" concept. Now define "viable", but some recent ompanies (like startups) DO often release unfinished/unreliable products as "MVPs", that ultimately also make a net loss, so this isn't that different.

Engineers, even these days, know how hard it can be to step foot against a company's management. Sometimes the only way out is to resign. IME, most engineers won't, and will end up doing what they are asked, and constantly whine about it. More comfortable than losing your job.

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