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Working with a Manufacturer to Repackage Their Silicon

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KL27x:

--- Quote ---This is a product that is still being manufactured and the ICs plug into a module that is available to the end customer.  The end customer off-times will remove the IC from the module and plug in a new one that has been flashed with new and specific fuse settings to tweak the module's operation.
--- End quote ---


Perhaps you are missing an opportunity. If customers often swap IC's, maybe there's a better way. Instead of making your product into a PDIP form factor to be compatible with thru hole dino-poop, you could make and sell an adaptor that they can plug in and leave in the DIP chip socket to bring this dinosaur into the 21st century. Maybe this way you can make the adaptor an upsell, and your firmware modules can now be made with edge contacts or square header which is cheaper and easier to source and assemble and way more robust than PDIP pins what are made to be inserted once. You retain the full margin on your firmware plug-ins, and you get customers to switch over to your paradigm for future modules.

Oldtestgear:
I worked in the semiconductor industry with manufacturers & a specialist die distributor that also repackaged bare die. I quit to take early retirement in 2005, so my knowledge may be sadly out of date.

- It was very rare that the semiconductor manufacturer will sell die / wafers at a price similar to the finished part.
- Quantities could vary from a few thousand parts MOQ to many times this.
- Assembly used to be inexpensive if using an off shore sub contractor.
- Test was always a challenge for memory & micro products. Particularly if full parametric testing was needed. Most manufacturers would not share test tapes or procedures meaning that  testing was often left to the discretion of the company doing the job. Some testing was really comprehensive if done by a reputable test house. Sometimes a lot was ignored in the hope that the customer would not find out. We had a few instances where we had to step in & try to sort out a job that another company had screwed up.
- Die can be shrunk or changed quite regularly, especially if this improves the yield. What used to fit happily in a 28 pin DIP may not fit so well now if intended for a PLCC or similar.
- Each semiconductor vendor will have their own criteria for wafer or die sales. Direct sales will always have to be cost effective. Shipping wafers is not a simple task if the manufacturer does not do this on a regular basis.

I have negotiated contracts with Intel (they DID NOT sell wafers ordinarily), Cypress Semi., Zilog & many others where they did not offer the part required by my customer. Some of the discussions took a year or more to set up an agreement. All looked at the $ value as the first step. Insufficient $ value meant instant refusal. I enjoyed the challenge of dealing with these companies & some of the terms imposed were truly hilarious. One company in Silicon Valley refused to deal with us through their European Office. They genuinely demanded that we hand carry a bankers draft from the UK for $125000 & collect the wafers from their office. Great fun getting that sum through US Customs as we had to declare any monetary instrument of more than $10k.
 Happy days when the world was a simpler place to do business in.

Phil

shanekent:
Thank you for that insight, Phil!

I ended up speaking with some of the executive management team at the manufacturer's USA branch this afternoon and I got some useful information.  They are willing to look into my request to have the obsoleted 28-PDIP package brought back to life, but the MOQ for such a design is 500,000 pieces.    Not much of a surprise, really.

It turns out that they'd be willing to make smaller runs, but the limiting factor is actually the lead frame manufacturer that they use.   The lead frame manufacturer won't even begin looking at projects like this until we're talking about that quantity of units.  Obviously I'd be able to find a lead frame manufacturer in China that would be willing to make smaller quantities, but it would be nearly impossible to convince this manufacturer to use a lead frame provider that is completely unknown in their eyes.

500,000 pieces might be possible for me to convince my client on, but I'd have to push hard.     Useful information regardless so I figured I'd share it!

-S

tszaboo:
IMHO, you were buying from a distributor, and you had a contract with them to buy this chip, regularly. So the bean counter at the fab already was aware that you were buying this chip, and informed you ahead of time that this will be obsoleted, and there is a last time buy. This was the past, you had a chance of buying this chip. Probably your bean counter ignored best industry practices, because most of them are short sighted weasels, but thats beyond the scope of this post.
So the fab knew that you are a customer for this chip, yet they discontinued it. What makes you think if you contact them they will take it back into their portfolio?
There are legitimate reasons, why DIP packages are discontinued, some of them is because of RoHS, some of them because there is a die shrink, etc.
That being said, nothing prevents you from contacting them, that will probably cost nothing. There are also specialised vendors, that hunt you obsolete stuff, it is surprising what lurks in the warehouse of some companies.

magic:
So you wasted five minutes of your life writing this post because you responded to the OP without reading the thread ::)

:P ;D

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