40 / 84
The market for electronics components
has changed radically over the past three
decades. The driving force in terms of
component volume is now the consumer
market and no longer applications such
as mainframe computers or military and
industrial systems. Almost two-thirds
of global sales now are into the PC and
mobile-telephony markets, which are
heavily consumer driven.
The focus of the consumer markets is to
maintain a rapid pace of development
in which manufacturers attempt to
take full advantage of the advances in
process technology that occur typically
on a two-year cadence. Components
made on what was the most advanced
process two or three years ago are
quickly rendered obsolete by their
replacements. Because most of the
products that these devices go into
have an even shorter average shelf life,
this constant renewal is not a problem.
For users in industrial markets, the
replacement cycle of many modern
integrated circuits (ICs) has become
increasingly problematic. Although
dedicated
industrial-grade
parts,
such as those qualified for extended
temperature ranges, will generally be
supported for more than ten years
by IC manufacturers, other systems
within the vehicle that do not need
the environmental support of industrial
market-focused components will often
use consumer-grade parts as they offer
a high performance-cost ratio or simply
are the only components available with
the required computational, bandwidth
or signal-processing performance.
Manufacturers of medical systems often
have to face the problem that, by the
time they have succeeded in obtaining
regulatory approval for their systems,
suppliers will already has classified the
parts they depend on as mature.
Memory ICs tend to be highly vulnerable
to short-term shifts in supply strategy.
Parts designed for memory buses that
were state of the art five years ago are
now regarded as legacy designs, with all
but specialist manufacturers choosing
to focus on more recent bus interfaces
such as DDR4 or LPDDR3.
In many cases, manufacturers will
announce the end of production with
a last-time-buy announcement, which
may only arrive six months before
manufacturing on that product ceases.
The decision that the user needs to
take at this point is to work out whether
sourcing an alternative is viable and,
if not, if there is a requirement to
place a last-time buy. The user needs
to work out how many they are likely
to need to continue to support their
products to cover their own lifetime-
support commitments. If they wait
and miss the deadline, they need to
find other ways to source spare parts,
which may be through the grey market.
Manufacturers will often place device
stock they no longer need onto the
grey market in order to recoup some
of their expenditure. Unfortunately, the
Avoid the pitfalls of obsolescence
Dave Doherty, Digi-Key
40 l New-Tech Magazine Europe