Not this exact thing, but I make a hardware product akin to a guitar pedal. I designed around a component type that the semiconductor industry was phasing out. One day I noticed that the list of alternative parts at my distributor included many that were marked "obsolete." I panicked and bought the entire stock of the part number that I use.
At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more than a lifetime supply, but otherwise I'd have been faced with a re-design and limited options.
For another of my products, during the pandemic, the part I was using became unavailable, and I had to re-design my board to accommodate a part of the same type in a different package. Then I couldn't buy either part, but found an odd lot at a Texas Instruments factory in China, which I bought.
Dealing with shortage and obsolescence issues is a constant battle. There have been crises in the industry caused by plants catching on fire.
One thing I've always said that with products, especially when they're parts. They should be required to be made "open" as soon as you stop making and/or selling them.
They're making you nothing, they're going to vanish into the nether if the documentation is lost....
Not literally, but I had two projects I had to fundamentally redesign due to multi-year chip shortages in the COVID years. And we're not talking about any fancy chips.
Same with ATMegas: I was working on a product line which was based on the atmega32u4 for legacy reasons. They became unobtainium and our platform recently started gaining RP2040 support - which was readily available at lower cost - so the decision to switch wasn't too hard.
A power converter I designed 3 years ago needs redesigning because the company that made the transistors was bought out and all their packages were phased out. And they were some fucking good packages that allowed for very good cooling and very easy parallelling of transistors using both sides of the PCB.
Not this exact thing, but I make a hardware product akin to a guitar pedal. I designed around a component type that the semiconductor industry was phasing out. One day I noticed that the list of alternative parts at my distributor included many that were marked "obsolete." I panicked and bought the entire stock of the part number that I use.
At this point I have the only stock of this part in the world, and it's more than a lifetime supply, but otherwise I'd have been faced with a re-design and limited options.
For another of my products, during the pandemic, the part I was using became unavailable, and I had to re-design my board to accommodate a part of the same type in a different package. Then I couldn't buy either part, but found an odd lot at a Texas Instruments factory in China, which I bought.
Dealing with shortage and obsolescence issues is a constant battle. There have been crises in the industry caused by plants catching on fire.
One thing I've always said that with products, especially when they're parts. They should be required to be made "open" as soon as you stop making and/or selling them.
They're making you nothing, they're going to vanish into the nether if the documentation is lost....
This [0] was a pretty big deal in the audio electronics industry.
[0] https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...
Not literally, but I had two projects I had to fundamentally redesign due to multi-year chip shortages in the COVID years. And we're not talking about any fancy chips.
STM32 had this problem of disappearing for years. At least I was forced to move to ESP32 and have never returned back.
Same with ATMegas: I was working on a product line which was based on the atmega32u4 for legacy reasons. They became unobtainium and our platform recently started gaining RP2040 support - which was readily available at lower cost - so the decision to switch wasn't too hard.
A power converter I designed 3 years ago needs redesigning because the company that made the transistors was bought out and all their packages were phased out. And they were some fucking good packages that allowed for very good cooling and very easy parallelling of transistors using both sides of the PCB.