On Thu, 07 Jan 1999 18:26:23 +0100, Richard Schaetzl
<Richard.Schaetzl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> jammed all night, and by sunrise was
overheard remarking:
> Matthias Wilke wrote:
>
> > I have heard, that some OM-4 and OM-2SP need an exchange of circuits
> > because of battery drain (with my OM-2n and OM-4 Ti I don't know this
> > problem, but I turn off beeping and don't use the viewfinder illumination).
> > Then John wrote, that the replace circuit for the OM-2SP is sold out. My
> > question is, isn't it possible to build such an circuit in small series.
> So why should it not possible in the future to have new cicuits?
There are a couple of possibilities. I rather suspect these parts are
custom-designed Olympus ICs that simply went out of production. There's
nothing you or I as individuals could do about this, but it's quite
possible that an actual business with cash-in-hand could get some new
parts. Usually when a custom chip is made, many wafers are produced and
tested, but not necessarily all of them are packaged. The remaining
cut wafer, the die bank, are kept around until new chips are needed.
When a part is being discontinued, they may make some extra die on the
last run, maybe not, it all depends.
So, anyway, to get to the point, there's a chance that Olympus or
whoever made these custom parts still has a die bank, but it wasn't
worth their while to package new parts for 10 or 20 year-old cameras. If
you knew who to ask at Olympus, who knows. They might even sell them
cheap. Then you would need to find a contract IC manufacturing house to
package and test the parts, and you're done. Testing is easy if the
original test programs still exist, it might be a bear if they don't.
The most critical, and most easily lost element of any design process
like this is basic "how to" information.
Making a new chip isn't impossible these days either. Now, a fully
custom design is impractical; you would need about $250K to fund the
design and development of a small chip, given a designer working cheap
with existing tools. The hard part here, of course, is quantifying what
it does. Can you get the original design documents or, better still,
schematics from Olympus? Alternately, if the chips are digital, you can
get programmable chips today for fairly cheap that can do just about
anything a custom part could do 20 years back. Even if the parts were
custom analog, you might be able to use some D/A and A/D conversion
circuits to process in the digital domain.
Obviously, this is all very general, I don't have any idea how complex
these missing parts are. Naturally, trouble with my OM-4 would make it a
whole lot more important to me to find out. Hopefully something I'll
never be interesed in doing :-)
--
Dave Haynie | V.P. Technology, Met@box Infonet, AG | http://www.metabox.de
Be Dev #2024 | NB851 Powered! | Amiga 2000, 3000, 4000, PIOS One
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