Likely production life of an ST ARM CPU?

[coppice]

Why would 'automotive' run for longer? ECUs and such can be changed. I have just got my hands on an ECU from a KIA car which uses a load of Siemens chips, including one 16 bit uC, and most of it is discontinued. But the ECU is current production, looking at date codes.

Automotive customers just don't buy semiconductors without a lot of commitments about qualification and long term supply. Just because the MCU you found is discontinued that doesn't mean KIA, or its module supplier, has any issues continuing to get these parts. It just means the aren't being offered to new customers. There might still be new dies being made, but at a price that isn't attractive for the vendor to offer the parts to new customers (process costs tend to rise as a process ages sufficiently). Die production may have ended, and even the fab's process may have been closed down. In that case the vendor will have created a die bank sufficient to service its existing customers for the part for as long as their supply commitment continues. Only a massive increase in sales of a car using that MCU could cause supply problems, but older models don't usually see a sale boom.

[coppice]

If it's not automotive, you can forget about comitted production life of anything semiconductor of more than 10yrs or around, the industry is too dynamic and in the era of fabless and "we do everything at TSMC", the manufacturing technology itself may disappear and the chip must be redesigned.

Its not just automotive. If its not for consumer applications. its quite likely you can choose for your design from a pool of suitable parts which have a really long term supply commitment. Vendors love these. They may not be the highest volume selling parts, but if you can get a design in with an industrial application you will probably see steady sales for many years, without any additional sales and support effort after the product is in stable production.

[westfw]

The 2313 went obsolete a long time ago

AT90S2313 went obsolete about the same time as AT90S1200.  ATtiny2313a is still active...(man, I was looking at other potential replacements - Atmel sure liked to move their power pins around...)

[peter-h]

Thanks for that 2313 tip!

[Bassman59]

It's a very funny remark that people who used hardware abstraction libraries fear to design in new parts because they know hardware abstraction libraries didn't abstract hardware.

The main problem is that the API for the hardware abstraction library becomes obsolete quicker than the chips it supports.

Oh, good god, this.

A new version of the tools generally means a new version of the vendor-provided libraries that are not compatible with old (like from last year) designs using chips that have been in production for five years.

[peter-h]

I have stopped updating the Cube IDE installation for this reason. Once it works and you can compile a project, step it, etc, there is no reason to update it.

Also there is no mechanism for bug fixing by the vendors, so a bug could have been independently fixed by 100 developers in the field (of whom say 90 won't post it anywhere) and the vendor will still not fix it in their code. There is nobody to contact, nobody to help, everybody is on their own reading data sheets and posting questions everywhere they can in the hope somebody will answer...

[thm_w]

Also there is no mechanism for bug fixing by the vendors, so a bug could have been independently fixed by 100 developers in the field (of whom say 90 won't post it anywhere) and the vendor will still not fix it in their code. There is nobody to contact, nobody to help, everybody is on their own reading data sheets and posting questions everywhere they can in the hope somebody will answer...

You can report the bug here or on ST forums, etc.: https://github.com/STMicroelectronics/STM32CubeF1/

[brucehoult]

I know this is a different era but the Z180 ran for ~30 years, the H8/323 ran for ~25 years

You can still buy 65C02 in DIP40. In fact I bought a couple a few months ago. Unlike the original nMOS 6502 you can run them down to 0 Hz, which together with the external address and data buses (unlike microcontrollers) makes them really great for demonstrating how a CPU works cycle by cycle.

The 65C02 has been available for 38 years. If you count back to the nMOS 6502 it's 46 years of binary-compatibility and pin/package compatibility.

I have just come across a chip called ESP32-WROOM-32E which claims a 12 year life but is so specialised that I would be amazed if any product based on it would be made for that long. But that CPU is unbelievable, especially for the incredibly low price of £2.16 one-off. Never heard of Espressif Systems...

Never heard of Espressif? Their WIFI chips with user-programmable 32 bit CPUs and a decent amount of RAM etc have been *everywhere* the last five or six years.