John,
Like it or not, in today's digital chip driven world ALL manufacturers are
at the mercy of the three year cycle of computers being obsoleted.
The processors and DSP chips are soon discontinued, and there is no choice
but to redesign the whole, to meet what is available in the digital arena.
In many cases, transistor and chip manufacturers have discontinued whole
families of semiconductors, such as Motorola did when they divested their
business of the bipolar transistors they made for years. What is driving
the semiconductor industries now, are the cell phone business models that do
not need high power RF transistors for the HF range.
The shift from single microcomputer chips to multiple processors, the
changes in types of memories, the types of bus input and output from
computers, have all obsoleted many pieces of hardware designed to work with
a computer of a given design. When the computer designers go down a
different path, the other manufacturers cannot do much more than follow.
In industry, we do "lifetime buys" for military connected equipment we use
or modify in order to keep it working for an indefinite life. Sometimes, a
company suddenly discontinues a part and even that is not an option in
today's volatile world based economy. The factory building your micro, or
DSP, may be half a world away and could care less that a hobby piece of
equipment cannot be upgraded when their chip goes away. They deal in
commodity quantities of thousands of chips.
Waxing philosophical, we should celebrate and support American industry like
Ten Tec, before we lose all control and ability to manufacture electronics.
I think it is dangerous that most in our electronic parts basket is made
overseas and thus the line of supply is easily disrupted. Until more parts
manufacturing is revived on shore, American electronics is at the mercy of
the world suppliers.
Stuart
K5KVH
_______________________________________________
TenTec mailing list
TenTec@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/tentec
|