3 ms·

> impossible to find because a factory in Indonesia is on fire Has that happened to you?

analog31 2mo ago
Not this exact thing, but I make a hardware product akin to a guitar pedal. I designed around a component type that the semiconductor industry was phasing out. One day I noticed that the list of alternative parts at my distributor included many that were marked "obsolete." I panicked and bought the entire stock of the part number that I use. At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more than a lifetime supply, but otherwise I'd have been faced with a re-design and limited options. For another of my products, during the pandemic, the part I was using became unavailable, and I had to re-design my board to accommodate a part of the same type in a different package. Then I couldn't buy either part, but found an odd lot at a Texas Instruments factory in China, which I bought. Dealing with shortage and obsolescence issues is a constant battle. There have been crises in the industry caused by plants catching on fire.
- marysol5 2mo ago
  One thing I've always said that with products, especially when they're parts. They should be required to be made "open" as soon as you stop making and/or selling them. They're making you nothing, they're going to vanish into the nether if the documentation is lost....
skippyfish 2mo ago
Not literally, but I had two projects I had to fundamentally redesign due to multi-year chip shortages in the COVID years. And we're not talking about any fancy chips.
- Geof25 2mo ago
  STM32 had this problem of disappearing for years. At least I was forced to move to ESP32 and have never returned back.
  - crote 2mo ago
    Same with ATMegas: I was working on a product line which was based on the atmega32u4 for legacy reasons. They became unobtainium and our platform recently started gaining RP2040 support - which was readily available at lower cost - so the decision to switch wasn't too hard.
PowerElectronix 2mo ago
A power converter I designed 3 years ago needs redesigning because the company that made the transistors was bought out and all their packages were phased out. And they were some fucking good packages that allowed for very good cooling and very easy parallelling of transistors using both sides of the PCB.
InitialLastName 2mo ago
This [0] was a pretty big deal in the audio electronics industry. [0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chip-factory https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...

Not this exact thing, but I make a hardware product akin to a guitar pedal. I designed around a component type that the semiconductor industry was phasing out. One day I noticed that the list of alternative parts at my distributor included many that were marked "obsolete." I panicked and bought the entire stock of the part number that I use. At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more than a lifetime supply, but otherwise I'd have been faced with a re-design and limited options. For another of my products, during the pandemic, the part I was using became unavailable, and I had to re-design my board to accommodate a part of the same type in a different package. Then I couldn't buy either part, but found an odd lot at a Texas Instruments factory in China, which I bought. Dealing with shortage and obsolescence issues is a constant battle. There have been crises in the industry caused by plants catching on fire.

marysol5 2mo ago
One thing I've always said that with products, especially when they're parts. They should be required to be made "open" as soon as you stop making and/or selling them. They're making you nothing, they're going to vanish into the nether if the documentation is lost....

skippyfish 2mo ago

Not literally, but I had two projects I had to fundamentally redesign due to multi-year chip shortages in the COVID years. And we're not talking about any fancy chips.

Geof25 2mo ago
STM32 had this problem of disappearing for years. At least I was forced to move to ESP32 and have never returned back.
- crote 2mo ago
  Same with ATMegas: I was working on a product line which was based on the atmega32u4 for legacy reasons. They became unobtainium and our platform recently started gaining RP2040 support - which was readily available at lower cost - so the decision to switch wasn't too hard.

PowerElectronix 2mo ago

A power converter I designed 3 years ago needs redesigning because the company that made the transistors was bought out and all their packages were phased out. And they were some fucking good packages that allowed for very good cooling and very easy parallelling of transistors using both sides of the PCB.

InitialLastName 2mo ago

This [0] was a pretty big deal in the audio electronics industry. [0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chip-factory https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...