Here is the new agile development plan, three simple steps:
- First phase of the design is looking and see what is available now on the suppliers.
- Immediately do an initial BOM and have purchasing dept buy the WHOLE BOM for the whole estimated production of your gadget.
- Once all of the BOM items is safely in storage, start designing the actual product based of what you actually have in stock.
PRO: The wankery of having endless forum discussion about this LT or that TI DC-DC converter that has 96.83% on some specific loads vs 96.77% efficiency on all loads types is gone for ever, also the centicents price difference and having superior discussion and exasperated eye rollings and whining on that "overnighting" on some distributor didn't work properly and you had to wait until next day, the horror
PRO: Because once you have the parts in the initial BOM, is most of the time all that you have, one have to really estimate properly the actual implementation, no oopsies, or be responsible of a very expensive pile of useless stuff (that can be resold later, usually at a profit, but you'll be long fired by then).
PRO: Get rid of "independent consultants" and contractors, the companies need to have stuff in house, not buying the same designs again and again. That will clean the stables, forcing most of them in bankruptcy, early retirement and a life of collecting old TE and generally making place for a less entitled and humble generation of electronics designers, that will have to do whit what is available now for purchase, not what they think is is the next cool toy to play with and force it on the customers.
PRO: Allow for the software designers to take also the supremacy (and better pay), because your replaced MCU may be feature compatible, but the product needs a new firmware redesigned in short time.
Also this will get rid of "idiot savants", that do some crazy optimizations that only work on a specific series/model/silicone mask version of a MCU and it's totally useless and non-portable otherwise. You have a portable framework, that can be transposed to another MCU or GTFO. This in itself will make for better development process and getting rid of obsolete crap that is only alive because of this special optimizations.
So far, besides a moderate price increase, this chips shortage actually seems to only have advantages, this is why the industry maintains it, is a nice and profitable way to he wheat from the chaff, you can't cut it, you're out.
Cheers,
DC1MC
for highly sarcasm impaired morans, this whole post is a (almost) a joke