Walter Harley said:
what's your basis for that assertion? Not that I'm challenging it, but I
wouldn't take it on faith, either...
In round numbers, the military/space/avionics market consumes about
1% of the integrated circuits produced, the automotive market
about 4%, and various flavors of telecom and consumer electronics
the other 95%. In general terms (and therefore open to much debate),
the parts made for the different markets 30 years ago were quite
different, but the parts made over the last 10 years or are quite similar.
The reason for this is the fantastic strides made in reliability of even the
cheapest parts made them "good enough" to use in a lot of applications
where previously, "high reliability" parts were required. But that
caused another problem for OEMs; commercial electronics have
become incredibly reliable. The OEMs initial response was
brilliant, they pushed "extended warranties" on consumers who
remembered problems they had had with previous generations
of hardware. Over time, consumers have become much more
leary of buying extended warranties that their new experience
showed they would never collect on.
The big problem for OEMs is how to get consumers to replace
hardware that doesn't fail. The computer and cell phone OEMs
have done very well in providing increased functionality to make
this a mute point, but other product sectors (e.g. TVs) haven't
(don't get me started on the "digital TV" shell game). The obvious
solution was to literally build in timers that would FORCE the
hardware to fail after a certain date, but the companies legal
departments didn't like that idea. The second solution was to
design in parts that would wear out. The beauty of this solution
was that in most cases the parts that will fail early are SLIGHTLY
less expensive, and often have slightly better performance. So
now, an OEM can win on both ends, a cheaper product up front,
and selling a replacement at an earlier date than they otherwise
would. The problem is that the automotive market needed the
long term reliability because the automotive environment ages
parts a lot faster than sitting on a desk does. The problem for
the part manufactures is that 95% of their customers want a
product that the other 5% can't tolerate.
What is happening today is that the differences between the
automotive grade parts and the military grade parts is becoming
almost nil, but that they are becoming more and more different
from consumer grade parts. Little things like passivation,
metalization thickness, current density, bond wire materials
and thickness, and ionic impurities in the plastic molding
compounds are all becoming different whereas they used
to be the same. The company line always is something like
"to reduce costs/to increase market share/to provide more
performance/etc" and in most cases those things are true,
but they aren't the whole truth. Also, since this is real
engineering, there are always tradeoffs. In many cases you
CAN'T get the increased performance without decreasing the
reliability or radically increase the cost. And none of this is evil,
it is capitalism, pure and simple.