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| How is Chipageddon affecting you? |
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| peter-h:
Indeed; my point is that to maximise profit, the lead times are faked until the very collapse. |
| Kasper:
A 'coworker' recommended an IC supervisor for a button circuit. I rejected it due to low stock and made a more generic design with easily replaceable parts but signed up for notifications anyways. Now I'm getting notifications: part went obsolete. |
| VK3DRB:
--- Quote from: Kasper on January 03, 2023, 07:47:34 pm ---A 'coworker' recommended an IC supervisor for a button circuit. I rejected it due to low stock and made a more generic design with easily replaceable parts but signed up for notifications anyways. Now I'm getting notifications: part went obsolete. --- End quote --- Well done, but somewhat alarming when a nice chip goes off the radar for good. This sometimes happens when a smaller company is swallowed up by a larger one and then the bean counters decide to scrap a unique chip because volumes are now too low. But COVID might have taken some small companies under. I used a nice chip (ST or TI, I can't remember) in a design several years ago that was a momentary button control chip, where a short press turned provided a power-on signal, another short press provided a power-off signal, and a long 10s press caused a full power-on-reset if case of CPU lock-up. Similar to an on-CPU watchdog timer but it wasn't a watchdog timer. The CPU was in ultra low power sleep mode when it was off. I used that little button control chip it in a product where PCB real estate was very tight. Using a few of MOSFETs and and RC circuit could do the same thing but take up more space and add more BOM line items. It would be nice to remember what it was, but I no longer have the schematics. |
| Kasper:
That does sound nice. There are a variety of them with different options. Some sound useful. Just not ideal for me at a small startup. I wanted button, charger or programmer to turn it on. MCU to hold it on (when desired) and long press to turn it off even with frozen MCU. Also needed fast turn on from charger, to notify users quickly, low on-resistance, and level shifting between MCU and button circuit. That narrowed the selection down to few options for 'all in one' IC solutions and those solutions required almost as many components as my jellybean version. They also required a fair bit of time digging through datasheets to find them. I used a 4 pin load switch, 2 FETs in 1 package, 3 diodes in a common cathode package a few resistors and a cap. More BOM lines and not quite as small as the IC based solution but seemed safer and worked first try which the original recommendation from 'coworker' (before he recommended a low stock part) did not. |
| peter-h:
--- Quote ---add more BOM line items --- End quote --- Do some companies have such a rule? It would be utterly bizzare. Resistors and caps and common transistors are always available, and are always cheap. Using commodity parts to replace a unique chip, especially a weird thing like that, is always a good idea. |
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