Strategies to the Prediction, Mitigation and Management of Product Obsolescence

5.6 LOGIC PARTS

This section presents an approach to forecast the life cycle stage and the years to obsolescence of logic parts. Logic parts and their families cannot be described simply as memories, microprocessors, or microcontrollers because they do not have a unique, clear evolutional driver. Moreover, the families, also referred to as types of logic parts, are closely connected to the manufacturer’s individual product portfolio strategy. Further, a detailed analysis of every single logic part in complex systems is not cost-effective at all. Therefore, the application of procurement lifetime (see Chapter 4) is reasonable. The obsolescence dates for logic parts could be forecasted using the Basic or Advanced Life Cycle Method if an evolutionary parameter can be identified.

5.6.1 Types of Logic Parts

Logic parts are digital integrated circuits that control the operation of electronic systems and move data (Fairchild, 2000). Logic parts such as bus drivers, transceivers, clock drivers, gates, shift registers, multiplexers, and decoders perform a multitude of functions and are classed into families depending on technology type, such as CMOS, BiCMOS, ECL, and TTL.

A sampling of the major features of different logic families (Texas Instruments, 2000g) is provided next.

ABT (Advanced BiCMOS Technology):

The ABT family is manufactured using a 0.8 μm BiCMOS process and provides high drive up to 64 mA and propagation delays below the 5 ns range while maintaining very low power consumption. ...