I held a job at a company whose product line was designed in the late 1970s. When I came onboard there, they repeatedly told me that all the engineering, up and to that point, was just in redesigning and maintaining the legacy boards. So, for several months, that is exactly what I did for them. I spent most of my time talking to chip brokers trying to find a cache of various chips that hadn't been made in 20 years. I would spend hours searching the internet for obscure and lesser know chip houses to find parts. Sometimes I would score a huge batch of ICs, and other times I was just left feeling angry talking to shifty chip houses. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to this one. From what I understand, it's often 20% of any job.
So, since it's such a big part of engineering, what is the best practice in searching for obsolete parts? Are there definitive places to go, services to use, people to know?
Side story; I remember I found 1000, important, ICs for that company, roughly a 6 month supply. They would not buy them, why? Because they didn't want to store them. The recent "just in time inventory" strategy superseded my department. I even offered to store them all in my garage! So, they let them go. A few months later they were desperate, went back to buy them, and they were gone. The entire company went into a spiraling frenzy. They ended up paying almost the price of the final product for a single IC.
For the record, I ended up taking the product away from the IC and into the age of micro-controllers. I designed the software to be usable on several different uCs, longevity of the product would never be an issue again. Ultimately, a thankless gesture on my part. They downsized the entire department after I was done with the redesign. But that's just the curse of being a hapless salaryman.
Cabe
