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On Nov 28, 9:01*pm, Michael Black wrote:
On Mon, 28 Nov 2011, K7ITM wrote: With regard to the parts that places like DigiKey and Mouser and other authorized distributors stock: *I seriously doubt that any homebrew projects are going to have much effect on what they stock. *It's the parts that are bought for production, by the reel, or at least by hundreds for some of the more exotic parts, that get their attention. If you see them with a stock of 10,000 or more of something, you can bet they didn't get them because they got some orders from random homebrewers. But in the old days, it did matter. *When there were local parts stores, and small mail order places. *Why were there all those 2N706s specified for a long time, until 2N2222s became common? .... Hey, I'm just guessing here, but I'd bet that the 2N706 ("High speed logic switch," says the data sheet I brought up) was used by the hundreds of thousands, maybe by the millions, by computer manufacturers and other industrial/military electronics suppliers back in the pre-integrated circuit days. That made them inexpensive and readily available, and on the surplus market. Remember "PolyPaks" (sp?)? I still have the 30MHz universal counter I built out of PolyPaks parts, including Nixie tubes. I certainly had no illusions about me and hobby people like me driving the market for parts. I remember having a distinct impression at the time that the hobbyist parts companies bought what they could get their hands on for very low cost and sold what they could to us geeks. There's a supply- side reason a lot of those companies were located in the Boston tech corridor, Silicon Valley, or the L.A. aerospace zone. Yes, certainly some of them bought stock of things they could move from distributors, but I still don't see that the hobbyists drove what parts became the standards. The people designing ICs these days do it so they can sell large quantities of them. That means getting them designed into reasonably high volume products, and that's NOT the hobby or ham market. Heck, the stuff I design professionally is never sold in high enough volume to warrant design of any electronics parts 'specially for it, and it's produced in higher volume than any but the highest volume ham gear-- orders of magnitude more volume than any homebrew projects. Perhaps we're looking at this from completely different viewpoints. I'm looking at it from the point of view of a company that makes and sells, say, semiconductors. From that point of view, you don't ask how many the hobby market will buy--you find markets that need millions of parts. If you're successful, you don't mind that a tiny fraction of those parts end up in hobby projects, but when the main market dries up, you are unlikely to continue making wafers of that part just to supply homebrewers. That's not to say the home experimenter or low-volume industrial user has no impact on the large (or smaller) semiconductor manufacturer, by the way. I know that feedback from a ham trying to get low phase noise, who happened to discover a problem with a particular chip, had a significant effect on the manufacturer of that chip. I know that my own feedback to a very large semiconductor manufacturer caused them to discover a furnace problem and they shut down that line to fix it. I know that my feedback to the semiconductor product planners that come by occasionally has some effect on what they decide to do because they respect that what we do is pretty much cutting-edge, but the ideas would never see the light of day if they don't see a significant market for the resulting products (and that market is never going to be because of things I design, for sure). Cheers, Tom |
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