Fast Flowing Sands Of Time

The phrase: The Sands Of Time is understood in most languages.

Recently the sands of time have ressembled the waves on the sea!

None more so IMO than in the electronics business...

Texas Instruments (Burr-Brown), Analog Devices, National Semiconductors, Panasonic, Philips NXP, Motorola and Vishay (amongst others) have all been "exposed" to the "toxicity" of these turbulent times.

How could this affect you?

Easy - most Audio/Hi-Fi gear includes components from these manufacturers, or wholly owned subsidiaries of these manufacturers. Should they all fail (we hope not) the Audio/Hi-Fi industry would become a desert!

Even if they survive, already certain lines have been discontinued, and more will probably follow.

Where manufacturers rely on a particular type of component or worse - their sales effort rests on that component being part of their product, it must be a nervous time.

It's not like the car and banking industries who "can't be allowed to fail"

Then there's the other "killer" - the exchange rate: the prices of some components have risen by 50% for some UK manufacturers - do they, or can they get away with, raising their prices to track these changes? Will they scrap a design? Or will they put in the design hours and research and redevelop a circuit to use alternative components? And would it be, if you were party to that information, a deciding factor in whether or not you bought a particular piece of equipment?

From this designers viewpoint it looks like an ongoing effort getting alternative components to seamlessly behave like their now extinct or rare predecessors.

One thing's for sure - it's becoming second-nature whipping the screws off back panels and wearing-out desoldering tools at a great rate of knots.