This article note from Fortune magazine:
Chipmakers to carmakers: Get out of the Stone Age. (Fortune)
Carmakers to chipmakers: Your old chips actually fucking worked. Well, not worked as such, but failed in documented ways. It takes years to validate a new design, and not taking the time to do that validation could get people killed.
An all-out effort to get on and hold the cutting edge is all well and good, up to a point, but it can easily get to where your technology is so edgy that it fails in unexpected and undocumented ways that are difficult and expensive to fix. If you want to inflict an example of this on yourself, simply buy a 5 year old exotic(ish) luxury car and watch the dashboard periodically light up with messages of dire import, requiring a visit to the dealer with a minimum charge of $1500 just to visit them.
1 comment:
Ding!
Yeah, some of us design high-tech gadgets with long lifecycles, and having chips go out of production is a major headache. Sometimes we don't need the latest and greatest, especially for embedded control applications; old, boring, and predictable are the qualities we need.
Even worse is subscription-licensed software: the license must be renewed annually (and, in some cases, checked against the vendor's server frequently), and there's a trend toward enforcing updates, so you can't run the version of (e.g.) the FPGA toolchain with which you compiled the last working version of the firmware, making function tweaks extra interesting.
On the other hand, there are ongoing opportunities for designing replacement electronic modules using currently-available tech... if only there were proper functional documentation for the old modules that need replacing.
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