CERA2

Datasheetcera2 · embedded

Choosing a microcontroller you can still buy in 2033

Selecting a part for a product with a ten-year service life is a sourcing decision wearing an engineering costume. Peripherals and clock speed decide whether the design works. Availability decides whether it ships in year seven.

The questions that matter before the datasheet

Does the vendor publish a longevity commitment, and for how long? Is the part a member of a pin-compatible family, so that a bigger or smaller sibling is a footprint-free change? Is there a second source, and is it genuinely a second source or a rebadge of the same die? Is the toolchain something you can archive — a released compiler version with a perpetual licence — or a cloud service that will be retired on somebody else’s schedule?

Designing for the substitution you will have to make

Leave the pins you do not need unconnected rather than reusing them for test points. Keep the bootloader interface on a connector, not on a pogo-pin fixture that only exists in one building. Write the hardware abstraction thin enough that a port is a week, not a quarter. And buy the lifetime quantity of anything with a single source at the moment the design freezes, because the notice period on a discontinuation is shorter than the qualification of a replacement.

The uncomfortable part

None of this survives a shortage. What survives a shortage is having decided, in advance, which functions are allowed to move to a different part and which are not — and having the test coverage to prove the move was harmless.

Index

CompactPCI: PCI in a Eurocard

By the mid-nineties the PC industry had a fast, cheap, well-supported bus, and the industrial world had mechanics that could survive a factory floor. CompactPCI, published in 1995,

PC/104: stacking instead of a backplane

PC/104 solved a mechanical problem before it solved an electrical one. An industrial controller that has to survive vibration cannot rely on a card edge sitting in a

VMEbus: the rack that outlived its industry

VMEbus was specified in 1981 around the Motorola 68000 and the Eurocard mechanics that European instrument makers already had on the shelf. Forty years later there are still