On Fri, 8 Jan 1999 16:21:16 -0000, "Dr. Chris Barrett" <cpbarrett@xxxxxxxxxxx>
jammed all night, and by sunrise was overheard remarking:
> Dave Hanie wrote:
> "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"
> This is true. We have the capability here to design custom chips for anyone,
> but the cost is horrendous.
Yup. Now, if there were millions clammering for this, Olympus themselves
would do the run and make some profit. But in small quantities, well,
you would be better off, financially anyway, buying a new camera.
> Whilst the chip you buy may not be expensive the cost of a single wafer run
> is very high.
> The cost is just spread over lots of devices.
Yup. For those not in the chip business, the cost of the actual chip is
a small part of what you pay if quantities aren't large enough. You have
to amortize development costs (engineering, non-refundable engineering
resource charges from the chip foundary, mask sets, all kinds of stuff)
over the cost of each chip. If you're selling 10M chips, and the
development cost was $500K, that's obviously only pennies a chip. But if
you only sell 10K chips? 1K? Then add in profit, the actual cost of the
chip, the cost of the repair itself, etc.
This formula also explains why Intel can spend $100M designing a new
chip and, as long as maintain volumes, still sell them as cheap as they
need to.
> The question in my mind is: What is the most common fault with these boards?
> Are the custom chips failing, or some other, cheaper and readily
> available component?
Right -- good question. And no just the most common fault, but really,
what are the failure modes? Even if chip failure were at 50%, that still
means that perfectly good custom chips come out of those other 500f
repairs. If the camera people are following the pattern of most in-field
computer industry repairs, they're just swapping PCBs here. It could
well be that when a repair guy says "we're out of chips" he really means
"we can't get PCB OM-2Ax-177 anymore", and while it contains a custom
part made for Olympus, that may not be the only, or even the primary
failure mode.
Of course, the other linked question -- what happens to the old boards?
If they're thrown out as bad, it's a fairly moot point after the supply
of parts runs out.
> Could useable components be removed from old boards and remounted on
> new ones? Is it a hard board or a flexible circuit?
It doesn't matter -- you can always rework a board, given the right
level of technology. Being in R&D, I have done "microsurgery" on PCB
prototypes, parts barely large enough to see clearly with the naked eye.
Now, sure, it could still get expensive, in terms of manual labor, but
it's the kind of decision left to a few individuals at that point, not
requiring 1K or 10K interested broken OM-x users before it can be
considered.
> I've also wondered about the merits of re-silvering old pentaprisms, which
> could be done if the old metal can be stripped and new coatings put on.
> Some one like Edmund Scientific may be able to recoat these.
I suspect they can. Or at least could. Edmund (I used to live about 15
minutes from their place, now it's more like 35 minutes away) used to be
The Place to go if you wanted to grind your own telescope mirror. They
sold a kit including all the pieces, and you could carry in or mail the
polished glass for silvering, though I don't know if they did it
in-house. There's no obvious reason the same silvering service would
have a problem dealing with a pentaprism.
> Just my 0.02 Euros worth.
>
> Chris
>
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Dave Haynie | V.P. Technology, Met@box Infonet, AG | http://www.metabox.de
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