4 ms·
The thing about a car is that BOMs are monstrously large. If you have 1000 ICs in a car, and one of them is missing, that's a $100,000 car you can't sell. Car
by baybal2 6y ago
The thing about a car is that BOMs are monstrously large.
If you have 1000 ICs in a car, and one of them is missing, that's a $100,000 car you can't sell.
Car industry haphazardly buying out last stocks of ICs will not help them work around that "one missing chip" problem, and production lines are potentially stuck for many more months.
The panic was undue, well, or best say of no use. The are screwed, but its of no use for them to hope for some desperate moves improving the situation now if they can't assure 100% availability of all, and every component on their BOM.
I have few buddies who went to work on an ECU for MTU/Siemens. They ran exactly into that when their companies went for a complete redesign of their ECU to run on consumer STM32. They had hopes of that such old 180nm-130nm CMOS chips easily tolerating around 130C°, they did tests, it worked fine, and then they ran into undocumented high temperature protection kicking in on a slightly newer chip revision, but they already bough few millions of them, and other ICs for a new design in inventories.
- Xorlev 6y agoAnd now STM32 are really tough to find for hobby electronics when one used to find them everywhere, and cheap.
- swalsh 6y agoI was looking yesterday, the STM32 chip used in the typically $5 blue pill now goes for $16 a piece.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoWhat’s a $5 blue pill?
- swalsh 6y agoIt's a small development board (similar to Arduino but based on the STM32F103C8T6) It's often blue so people often call it the "blue pill"
- techrat 6y agoSimilar Microcontroller to others like the Teensy, Elite C, Proton C, Pro Micro, etc... All of which have been used in custom keyboard builds but are capable of doing other things as well.
- genmud 6y agoDude, I ended up buying like 10 or 15 blue pills a year or two ago with genuine STM32 chips for like $2/each. If they are clones, they have all the peripherals and complete ram/flash from my testing.
- rasz 6y ago>undocumented high temperature protection sneaky market segmentation by STM?
- sitkack 6y agoI doubt it. You want a part to shutdown if knows it is going to fail, not pull everything high and cause the device to catastrophically malfunction.
- skybrian 6y agoOuch. It seems like the way to reduce risk would be interchangeable parts from multiple suppliers?