By Meredith Courtemanche, managing editor, SMT Magazine
“In a perfect world.” This is a phrase uttered by many a project leader or product designer compiling a bill of materials (BOM) for a new product, new run of an existing assembly, or modified design. In a perfect world, market trends, materials changes, and technology advances would have no effect on the availability of components. No component would ever be obsolesced. And every component on the BOM would be readily available, in the quantities needed, at the start of your production run.
In the real world, something like 70% of the components specified for a long-design-cycle assembly will be obsolesced or headed toward end of life (EOL) by the time the assembly hits the manufacturing floor. The niche, high-reliability sectors — medical, military, aerospace, industrial — get hit the hardest by obsolescence, but the problem plagues all electronics manufacturers. We visited one components supplier, Rochester Electronics, to see how they keep phased-out components at the ready in an imperfect world.
Much of Rochester Electronics’ business is storage. They have over 10 billion silicon die in nitrogen-purged storage, and warehouses full of finished components. Some of these date back to the 1960s. It would be inaccurate to mistake the company for a simple old-parts distributor. Rochester’s services run the gamut from buying up and redistributing finished components when a manufacturer decides to discontinue the part (so-called mature or aftermarket devices), to testing packages, to performing authorized re-creation of parts that no longer have the proper specifications and certification documents. Theyare even authorized by chip manufacturers to build a component from scratch to substitute for a part that can no longer be feasible produced. The company’s Newburyport, Mass., headquarters include a failure analysis and re-creation lab, testing lab with a “museum” of legacy testing systems for mature devices, their die bank, and a burn-in test facility, along with three other storage buildings close by.
Rochester manufactures more than 20,000 standard parts types, using subcontractors to perform any necessary wafer dicing and device packaging. Every package, regardless of source, is tested in-house at the Newburyport facility. The testing lab is ESD and humidity controlled. Here, everything from mixed-signal to DRAM to logic components are verified. It was greatly expanded in the 1990s, when Rochester took on the military components lines from Intel. Now, the lab is evolving to handle newer package types, like BGAs.
In a perfect world, all of the associated intellectual property (IP) for a device, including the wafer probe cards, design certifications, etc, would arrive with the obsolesced component. Since this isn’t always the case, Rochester’s failure-analysis lab doubles as a reverse engineering facility, boasting acid deprocessors, cross-section grinders and an SEM microscope, metallurgical microscopes, and more. Sometimes entire fab and packaging processes have gone out of use, and Rochester re-manufactures a part, using modern processes, to function exactly the same as the legacy component. Die and packages often arrive without their burn-in test cards, and Rochester creates these as well, when needed. Ovens are real-time monitored and calibrated when loaded for highest accuracy in static and dynamic burn-in, as well as long-term life testing. Near the burn-in ovens,different burn-in trays for different vendors and package styles are stacked to the ceiling. Rochester performs burn-in test on all military components, and periodically on their own fabs to verify manufacturing. Other components are tested on customer-requested frequencies.
Supplying original-chip-manufacturer- (OCM-) verified components is a growing business, as procurement departments at electronics manufacturers and OEMs are facing increasingly ambiguous brokerage situations with the threat of counterfeit components ever present, and EOL/part change notices (PCN) constantly rerouting product design and manufacturing. The company estimates that 3% of all semiconductors are made obsolete each month. Rochester’s core customers have long design cycles, produce products with long life cycles, and must meet design verifications that prohibit part changes. Typically, this group includes medical device, military/aerospace, and industrial electronics manufacturers. Any customer can use Rochester’s “trailing edge” technology services to procure parts at last-time buy (LTB) from the OCM and store them securely. Rochester also helps customers develop risk mitigation strategies to better face and avoid parts changes in a product.
What can you do to bolster procurement security at your manufacturing facility? Rochester recommends avoiding high-risk component sources — independent distributors, brokers — that are possibly not audited, have improper storage, or are buying from disreputable sources. They also suggest investing in a BOM analysis software tool that actively searches out PCNs and EOL notices. In a perfect world, every PCN would reach every relevant customer, but this rarely is the case. Finding out about LTBs earlier gives the manufacturer, and their OEM partner, time to decide on what quantities to buy, whether a redesign would be more cost-effective, etc. Use the most caution with possibly lucrative counterfeiting opportunities. Intel and Texas Instruments catch two counterfeiting events each day, Rochester reports. Consider the human cost, profit losses, and production downtime buying counterfeits will create. Trailing edge technology is a niche market. Unfortunately, franchised distributors like Rochester share this niche with counterfeiters looking to profit from component obsolescence, delays, or quantity problems. As the quirky “Adventures of Captain Rochester” company cartoon points out, counterfeit components are in outer space, on the battlefield, and in hospitals right now. To prevent this, manufacturers must find a way to use only “authorized and traceable product from reliable sources.”
We visited Rochester Electronics’ Newburyport facilities as part of a joint SMTA/IMAPS chapters meeting. To see more information on the company, visit www.rocelec.com.
Reprinted with permission from SMT Magazine