How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[T3sl4co1l]

Spent a bit too much time looking for a specific part, finally scratching up a paltry handful from Hong Kong off ebay.. only to find a healthy supply an industrial variant a few days later, listed under a completely different part number scheme, hinted at by some obscure marketing document. 

Anyone know of a site that may offer related parts lookup? Digikey has basic functions but missed reccomending this fully pin-compatible variant. Datasheets often don't list current replacements or variants for an obsoleted part.

For free, I don't know.  SiliconExpert is a subscription service that has that, as well as supplier insight, lifetime, etc.

Octopart has supplier insight for free, and probably a lot of advertising and tracking stuff to make their free service feasible.

If you know any FAEs you can always ask them, but that's just for individual manufacturers, and good luck if you're not a big enough player to have some on call.

Tim

[KE5FX]

realcomponents.com has a decent search engine.  Just enter the main body of the part number, leaving off any suffixes, and it will often return some inventory listings.  No prices, though; you have to ask for quotes, and the numbers you get back will be waaaay up there.

Same with plain old Octopart, for that matter.  They are pretty good at returning qualifying part numbers.  Still, there have been times when direct searches at the vendors' sites return results that don't show up on Octopart.

[VK3DRB]

Email spam from today: "Purchasing on TI.com has never been more convenient"

Boy does this piss me off. 

Guess what, TI:

I don't care how convenient you consider your online store to be, not having parts OR LEADTIMES automatically makes it infinitely inconvenient.

The  detector is at full scale deflection at TI. In my opinion, the TI is misleading Wall Street by hiding from their annual report that designers are using alternative brands of chips as TI us with contempt, thereby potentially impacting demand of TI chips in the medium to long term. No-one is going to redesign a product and go through the testing and regulatory approval processes again just because TI wakes up to itself one day. I have already done a few designs using alternative vendor's chips.

Botch (Bosch) Sensortec is another offender who will lose business due to contempt of customers. Colonel Klink needs to get the bullet. 

[aneevuser]

i would say it's just the fact that diacs are slowly going into oblivion...

Are they? I had no idea. Why is that?

[Ian.M]

Because just about everything has a MCU or special purpose chip nowadays as discrete analog design slowly slides towards being a lost art.

[tom66]

DIACs used to be commonly used in Royer oscillators as featured in compact fluro lamps.  Those are almost entirely a dead technology now (I believe some are still produced as photography lights but even that may be changing) and so there will be much less demand for them.

[cdev]

what about young people going into the field, are they?

[IDEngineer]

My son is presently pursuing his EE degree at CalPoly, and they're only accepting 5% of freshmen applicants, so I take that as an indication of young people entering the field.

[tom66]

There are plenty of young engineers.  I wonder if they will catch up with the greybeards retiring, but salaries are high so I guess we'll see.

[coppice]

My son is presently pursuing his EE degree at CalPoly, and they're only accepting 5% of freshmen applicants, so I take that as an indication of young people entering the field.

Most people apply to multiple schools. Some apply to many. A good school gets way more applicants than a weak one. So, accepting only 5% at a decent college might say very little about a subject's popularity. It probably says the college is well regarded, though.

[coppice]

There are plenty of young engineers.  I wonder if they will catch up with the greybeards retiring, but salaries are high so I guess we'll see.

That might be a parochial view. In the UK there is a very low demand for engineers these days, so the available engineers look like "plenty". However, statistics for the UK say the average age of most types of engineers is climbing steadily. So, there might be sufficient engineers joining industry, but its not that many. If you look at other countries with strong engineering industries the picture looks different. In China they graduate huge numbers of engineers each year, and you still struggle to find a good one.

[mikeselectricstuff]

DIACs used to be commonly used in Royer oscillators as featured in compact fluro lamps.  Those are almost entirely a dead technology now (I believe some are still produced as photography lights but even that may be changing) and so there will be much less demand for them.

The other common use, in leading-edge triac dimmers is also dying out, as LEDs prefer trailing-edge dimming.
I used to design  them into small industrial xenon strobes, but these are also being replaced by LEDs

[Mangozac]

All these people complaining about TI are acting like there are other better options. It's not like other manufacturers are any easier to source/deal with at the moment and as pointed out by one poster, at least they're not giving fictitious lead times.

[KE5FX]

All these people complaining about TI are acting like there are other better options. It's not like other manufacturers are any easier to source/deal with at the moment and as pointed out by one poster, at least they're not giving fictitious lead times.

Right now the class-leading components in several areas come from TI.  It's a real problem for high-performance designs.

[Mangozac]

Right now the class-leading components in several areas come from TI.  It's a real problem for high-performance designs.

That's what I mean - either there are no alternatives OR compatible parts from other manufacturers are in just as short supply.

[Kasper]

There are plenty of young engineers.  I wonder if they will catch up with the greybeards retiring, but salaries are high so I guess we'll see.

Where are salaries high? What is a high salary?  High compared to other industries or high for the cost of living and schooling?

If I were to start over now, I'd go for a trade, probably carpentry. The shortage of homes in Canada seems to be a bigger problem than chipageddon.

[IDEngineer]

A 30-ish MSEE friend just accepted an offer for a 100% work from home FPGA design position. $200K annually, $170K signing bonus, plus stock options. This is with a decent sized tech company we've all heard of. The signing bonus will pay off his house. I consider that a very nice package for a guy at that point in his career.

[Kasper]

A 30-ish MSEE friend just accepted an offer for a 100% work from home FPGA design position. $200K annually, $170K signing bonus, plus stock options. This is with a decent sized tech company we've all heard of. The signing bonus will pay off his house. I consider that a very nice package for a guy at that point in his career.

Wow! Do they hire Canadians? 

[b_force]

A 30-ish MSEE friend just accepted an offer for a 100% work from home FPGA design position. $200K annually, $170K signing bonus, plus stock options. This is with a decent sized tech company we've all heard of. The signing bonus will pay off his house. I consider that a very nice package for a guy at that point in his career.

Jeez, for most engineers here in Europe that's something that only exists in dreams.
Most people don't even come close to 1/4 of that, especially not at that age.

There is an old time saying, that you do engineering because you love it, not because it pays well.

[coppice]

There is an old time saying, that you do engineering because you love it, not because it pays well.

Its that kind of mentality that keeps your salary down. How about an attitude like you can be so cost effective that it isn't worth your time considering low paid work?

[IDEngineer]

I should add that he had multiple offers from several large firms, including one from Microsoft for using FPGA's to hardware accelerate their backend searches. He chose the one that best suited his lifestyle, but it wasn't a one-off nor unique. He left several other positions unfilled when he picked this one.

The positions are out there. You just have to start looking for those that match your skill set.

[b_force]

There is an old time saying, that you do engineering because you love it, not because it pays well.

Its that kind of mentality that keeps your salary down. How about an attitude like you can be so cost effective that it isn't worth your time considering low paid work?

Good luck with that against employers

Doesn't have anything to do with mentality.
Most just use a set salary bracket, with a max of around 4500-5000 euro per month before tax
As for 30 years olds, count on around 2800-3500 euro a month full time.
The exceptions are indeed FPGA designers and obviously ICT

[Kasper]

I should add that he had multiple offers from several large firms, including one from Microsoft for using FPGA's to hardware accelerate their backend searches. He chose the one that best suited his lifestyle, but it wasn't a one-off nor unique. He left several other positions unfilled when he picked this one.

The positions are out there. You just have to start looking for those that match your skill set.

I had 3 offers when I finished school.  Tried the highest one briefly, wasn't worth it. Was only a bit higher than the others. Switched to the middle one and made their MVP then got laid off. Now I'm working for the lowest one and making more money doing home renos on the side.

[coppice]

There is an old time saying, that you do engineering because you love it, not because it pays well.

Its that kind of mentality that keeps your salary down. How about an attitude like you can be so cost effective that it isn't worth your time considering low paid work?

Good luck with that against employers

Doesn't have anything to do with mentality.
Most just use a set salary bracket, with a max of around 4500-5000 euro per month before tax
As for 30 years olds, count on around 2800-3500 euro a month full time.
The exceptions are indeed FPGA designers and obviously ICT

There are employers who want blood from a stone, and employers who pay according to what they can get from you. If you can drive cost out of a product better than the next engineer, or hit a sweet spot where your work gets a really good chunk of the market, only deadbeat companies won't pay for those results. Many of the companies who pay too much die quickly. Equally those who don't pay enough don't do well. The successful are usually paying pretty well for the right people, and not paying that great for the rest. The question is are you the right person, and can they be convinced you are. Note that its pretty hard to find high pay in most small niches. If you want a high income it needs to be spreadable across a large number of sales, or those sales need to be super high value.

[tom66]

Where are salaries high? What is a high salary?  High compared to other industries or high for the cost of living and schooling?

If I were to start over now, I'd go for a trade, probably carpentry. The shortage of homes in Canada seems to be a bigger problem than chipageddon.

I work in Cambridgeshire, salary here is ca ~top 8% of salaries in the UK.  I'm fairly comfortable.  I could be paid more, sure, but it's not too bad. 

I regularly see job ads for positions for principal/senior engineers at £90-100k pa (~$110-125k USD).   I guess it depends on what you want in life but I'd feel quite comfortable on that.

In the North of England where I used to be based the jobs topped out around £40k pa.  You unfortunately do need to live in a more expensive area to get the good jobs (but to a degree COVID has changed that.  I'm in the office once per week typically, so I've started looking at somewhere further away to live, as I don't mind a long commute if I only do it occasionally.)