Anyone any inside info as to why Microchip are so far behind with some of their chip restockings?
I use to use the 16F1825 a lot, the 12f1822 and other 12f's (1822 is back in stock with microchip but the postage is a bit much!) and the 10f range, amongst others....
I guess these lines are just not priority enough for imediate production so newer stuff is being produced?
So frustrating!
A lot of the 8-bit parts are unobtanium, QFNs and DIPs seem to be the most available. 16F18xx are pretty old now so maybe they're concentrating on newer parts
32-bit ones seem less affected, though generally only hundreds rather than thousands in stock.
Maybe they're still busy fulfilling orders placed when the chip shortage was in effect, maybe they got some big orders for specific pic chips and gave other series lower priority
Could be those specific models you want are made from poorly binned dies or from dies where they disable some flash memory and they have too much demand for the full versions or for versions every worse binned (lower pin count or whatever)
Maybe they're still busy fulfilling orders placed when the chip shortage was in effect
The chip shortage is still "in effect".
Almost anything is unobtainium these days. If you try to find the exact rationale
for a given part, that's wasted time. In general, you can't.
To get an idea of the situation, go to your favorite distributor, and issue a generic search, such as "microcontrollers". Now filter the "in stock" parts exclusively. On average, you'll get about a 10% ratio. The 10% availability is about what you get for ICs in general these days. It hasn't evolved much in several months. The shortage is rather stable.
But it's not just semiconductors either. Connectors tend to be harder to get than usual.
It's all rather worrying, especially considering instabibility between ourselves and China!
Back to the bad old days when "hobbyists" only had access to a small subset of the available microcontrollers, from weird vendors at significant markups. :-( You can get a PIC16f54, a PIC16f84, or an 8031 with random stuff in ROM that you can avoid running using EA and external memory. And maybe an AT90S1200.
Chipageddon is still going on
A lot of the 8-bit parts are unobtanium, QFNs and DIPs seem to be the most available. 16F18xx are pretty old now so maybe they're concentrating on newer parts
32-bit ones seem less affected, though generally only hundreds rather than thousands in stock.
I bet the 18xx are unobtainable because they are code-compatible with the PIC16F1829LIN (same for the K22 series, code compatible with PIC18F14K22LIN)
I just received a dozen PIC18F16Q41 uCs yesterday. And 2 dozen PIC16F1828. Ordered 4 days prior.
Was about to buy few of these Q series before the pandemic, they pack some serious 8-bit power.
But they got delayed, and delayed.... Late 2022...2023... Now 2024