All my eggs in one basket

Y

yeahtuna

Well-known member
That's how I'm feeling right now in regards to my relationship with PJRC, and I suspect there's a similar feeling in regards to PJRC"s relationship with NXP.

Has there been any investigation into alternative silicon? I believe there are loads of STM processors around.
 
I am currently in the process of planing a PCB where I want to place a MCU without a development board. If you focus on STM chips that are in stock and have stock numbers that are high enough to be still there when I am done, the market is very very small, and not a single one is as powerful as the Teensy chip. The amount of RAM, Flash and Frequency is far behind the Teensy. Switching the CPU here would definitively be a step back without much positiv regarding Silikon availability.
 
About 9 months ago, I was talking to an acquaintance that works at one of the well known chip manufacturers here in the USA about the chip shortages. They don't do CPUs, but they do many of the popular peripheral chips.

In their case, wafer production at their US facilities was not an issue and they were sitting on more than enough wafers to support all demand from customers. The problem they had was that the chip packaging (dicing the wafers and putting into plastic housings) is all outsourced off-shore. He said that those jobs are relatively low skill, thus low paying, and its an unpopular type of work as it is very monotonous, so off-shore labor shortages at their packaging subcontractors was their entire issue.
 
All of our high performance products are on the 1062 processor now and we're not really having any issues with those. I try to maintain inventory in-house to ride out any unexpected supply chain disruptions and put in orders or backorders with Mouser when I do production runs. They have been great about getting us product near the expected delivery dates or ahead of schedule. Right now, they have a ton of the extended temp range 1062 product in stock, which seems promising to use:
https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetai...wIjVLugVpzg==&countryCode=US&currencyCode=USD

It sucks tying up capital to maintain inventory, but seems to be the way it is now and we're having to manage inventories of everything that's not a passive.

For the lower performance chips, we're trying out some of the STM32 chips for upcoming products. The inventory levels seem good, just have to update our internal tooling for the new code base. Nothing seems to beat the 1062 at the high end though and I can't say enough good things about the Teensy core libraries - I wish all the other chips were as easy to use reliably.
 
I was interested in stocking the extended temp range version but did some googling first to see if it works, and came across this post: https://forum.pjrc.com/threads/69357-Teensy-4-x-with-Industrial-Temp-iMXRT1062
Just FYI for anyone planning to use it.

Most of our products are based on the T3.2. The MK20DX chips are all out of stock (our order from Element14 is still in backorder since Apr 2021) but our next expected delivery date is July 2023, so we're just going to wait till then before deciding if we need to redesign. We spent a lot of time building on the Teensy core libraries so we're not really excited about switching out unless absolutely necessary.

Meanwhile, we've managed to secure enough IMXRT chips for this year. With the Mouser delivery dates for the IMXRT chips at Oct 23, we already had put in orders to ensure we have something to sell for the next year. And yes, it sucks having to tie up capital in inventory.

The current (and maybe bigger) concern now is whether the Teensy bootloader chips are facing any supply issues.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top