Hi welcome to the Eev blog an Electronics Engineering video blog of interest to anyone involved in electronics design. I'm your host Dave Jones Hi it's time for another drive time rant. Yes, it's back. I Haven't done this Uh segment in quite some time because I've been pretty much uh, leaving my rants for the Ow radio show which I do with Chris Gaml.

So if you haven't checked that out, the Ow.com small plug there uh but I thought I'd I' jump back in and do another drive time rant and this time around I thought I'd give some advice cuz I'm full of advice. Oh yeah, I thought I'd give some advice to the semiconductor manufacturers namely the ones that have the Uh active products like the, you know, microcontrollers, microprocessors, fpga, that sort of stuff because I think some of them are in need of advice. So here we go: Dave's top five tips for uh, having a successful getting a successful product out there for Market What these um, semiconductor manufacturers need to do to get their product and penetrate the market both the high-end and the low-end markets. But we'll get into that anyway.

Top five tips: Here we go: Number one: We're off. Tip: Number One One Stock These are in order, roughly in order of importance, but you can say they're all equally important. Okay, number one is stock if people cannot. If Engineers hobbyists, whoever cannot buy your parts and both in low medium and high volume, then they're not going to touch them.

Okay, you need visible stock on Digi key mous Fel sorry Element 14. Whatever the Bank name is this week. Uh, they've rebranded themselves. Ridiculous.

waste of time. Anyway, that's just an aside. Um, you need visible stock on these sites now I'm not just talking 50 or 100 Parts because if you're looking to design in a a part for a new Uh project or something like that and you're the first place you are going to go generally. I've mentioned this before is uh, you know the likes of the component Distributors not the traditional Distributors I'm talking about the online catalog Distributors dig key Mousa You know Element 14f farell Those sort of places are where people go and you know it's not good enough quite frankly to have um, you know 50 or 100 Parts there that.

that doesn't instill a lot of confidence that doesn't want me to design in that part into my next Uh project because if it's successful, then well, where am I going to get the parts from, right? It's I'm not going to trust that particular manufacturer or that particular Um series of devices or whatever. Okay, so you need stock, Not just, you know, a couple of hundred. I'm talking 5,000 10,000 They're the sort of figures If I see those on Parts in Mouser or dig Key or whoever, then I'm going to feel very confident about designing in that particular part. Now that might be an an illusionary thing, but it works okay.

having the the illusion of having Parts potentially down the track is a huge draw and you've got to have that. That's tip number one. Tip number two is you got to have usable packages. None of this BGA none of this, You know, bloody, uh micro? You know these Qfp packages and oh sorry, um uh, chip scale packages and all that sort of crap.

No I want something that I can damn well solder into prototypes, low medium volume manufacturer, something that I'm going to get a good yield with in manufacturer. So we're talking dip and we're talking so and we're talking uh, reasonable reasonable pitch? uh Qfp not5 mm. go to, you know, go up a bit I need reasonable packages if I can't get those Pgaas and um and Chip scale packages and all the all the rest of them. they're all fine for Consumer items very high volume stuff once you got your manufacturing process down pat, but it doesn't uh you, you're just not going to attract the uh, the low to medium um, scale people with those sort of packages.

Dip Ando please. Oh God Tip number three. Um, where you need uh, cheap or free development tools? Okay, now they don't have to be free I know, uh, Microchip? Have been on this um thing before they say oh, they won't give away their their development tools. You know they won't.

They want to make a a small amount of money on it. Well that's fine. Okay, but they need cheap, readily available, uh, development tools. And if you don't have those, then well, you're not going to penetrate the market.

So forget it now. Um, the uh. fourth one is, um, Open Source. Okay, you need open source? Um, not only development tools, preferably not like Gccc compilers and stuff like that, you need to support those that are manufacturing, um from the manufacturer level.

Okay, it's not good enough just to leave it up to someone else to do a one guy in a garage to ride a GCC port for that par. You know, for your brand of micro or something like that. And then you know, thinking that can cut it, it doesn't. You got to have proper manufacturer backing of, you know, open-source uh tools and that's just not.

um, that's just not the compilers. I'm talking about the uh, you know, the drivers, Things like, you know, Tcpip stacks and and uh, serial Port drivers and all sorts of and all the other stuff. Um, even you know realtime Os's and things like that. Very important.

Okay, tip number five: Um support standard platforms like you know, get involved and support and encourage at the man once again, at the manufacturing level. Um, support Ed platforms like Arduino or um, you know, beagle Board Of good examples: the Ti MSP platform I Guess the new little um, uh, $430 job or something like that. they're trying to create a little standard there. just you know, try and create these standards and back them.

Or if there's a standard already out there, use it and jump on board. I Mean um, you don't see the likes of At Mill and those sort of companies um, getting involved with the other Weo. Why? Why? it's a huge Market Why aren't they? You know? Sure, the bottom line: profit at the end of the year that goes on the balance sheet. you know it's It's probably not going to make a difference, but um, you need that Ecos system of of developers and enthusiasts using your parts and then that trickles up the market to, uh, you know, in in the future they'll start using your parts.

So really, manufacturers get behind and support these industrial. uh, these, um, industry sort of not industry standard, but you know, sort of deao standard uh platforms. It's going to be a winner. So there you go.

My top five tips to the uh. semiconductor manufacturers: Um, you know how to get your Uh products. Um, good market share, winning market share, and it's It's not rocket science. It's easy, but a lot of Manufacturers out there would just fail.

Uh, many of these basic points, they'll be just an epic fire and they wonder why they're spending oodles amount of money on marketing and they're not penetrating the market. It's because you don't have what we damn well want. God Get with the program. Manufacturers see you.