So I'm curious at what point do people making large runs of products (but not like we own our own fab size, say in the 1000+ board range), commit to buying the parts?
I made a board on parts that were available, I made a few cnc'd boards, did a test fit, got the quotes etc. then the CPU went out of stock everywhere, so i recoded the firmware to be half the size so it'd fit on a smaller part that was available.
Of course the moment i'm ready, the second CPU goes out of stock everywhere. Then the AT45DB chip i'm using also goes out of stock..
I wanted to make sure everything worked correctly, that the board fitted, made sense, that it worked and tested out ok.
I just cannot source the parts anywhere, and the lead times seem to be largely just made up, since they haven't really changed or gotten worse since i started looking worldwide.
So what approach do you take ? Where do you commit to the hardware.
Hopefully this semiconductor shortage gets over with soon, but i'm really against the idea of using anything from Atmel in the future, since all three chips are Atmel parts, and i've noted a few other people saying they've had problems sourcing AVR's
At this point i may have to switch to another CPU and new PCB, which basically means starting from scratch.