New-Tech Europe Magazine | July 2016 | Digital edition

Avoid the pitfalls of obsolescence

Dave Doherty, Digi-Key

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

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

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

40 l New-Tech Magazine Europe