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Ok, I understand you now. My experience has been working with devices which, while potentially dangerous, are voluminous enough that we can't have individual r

by zorpner 12y ago

Ok, I understand you now. My experience has been working with devices which, while potentially dangerous, are voluminous enough that we can't have individual relationships with every end user. While we'd be offering warranties/exchanges if we discovered a fake chip, we'd have no way of guaranteeing that they wouldn't update their controller in the meantime or of forcing them to exchange their board for a newer rev.

robomartin 12y ago
Right. Different perspectives. Things don't always fit neatly into the same box. So some degree I wonder whether FTDI is more of a niche market/small volume product than mass market. If you are making a high volume consumer device it behooves you to optimize cost by using microprocessors with integrated USB capabilities rather than resorting to a USB to serial chip. In other cases the USB to serial approach is attractive because either you have a very small micro or a situation where a full stack OS doesn't exist in the device. As an example, an 8051 derivative would be easier to interface with an FTDI chip. A TI (or whatever) 32 bit micro already comes with USB and there's plenty of support in the way of embedded driver code to make it work. It'd be interesting just how FTDI's market share is segmented. Not sure this information is available anywhere.