Today, even Year 2000- conscious manufacturers may face substantial problems in bringing their products to compliance. For example, the vendor who designed the embedded chip may itself be unaware of the Year 2000 Problem. Worse yet, that vendor may be out of business. In addition, many embedded chips are actually customized to fit a customer's request or a unique product specification, making it impossible to simply implement a standard fix for all of the products.
Still, many manufacturers are being asked to do just that. In July '97 Citicorp sent a memorandum out to all of its software manufacturers asking them about the embedded chips within their products. Congress is considering legislation to make this disclosure mandatory.
CK SIDEBAR: See Citicorp's Oct '97 reaction to input received:
exchange2000.com
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Explaining the Embedded Chip Year 2000 Problem (July 24 '97)
Embedded chips are microprocessors (small computers) that are found in single, isolated devices like cellular phones, microwave ovens, and pacemakers, and automated systems such as elevators and security systems. Their responsibility is to regulate the basic functioning of these machines-from making sure that pacemakers keep on ticking, to controlling when security alarms go off.
Unfortunately, many of these embedded chips contain date references to help them perform certain basic tasks essential to their proper functioning. For example, a pacemaker would likely have an internal, computerized device that records, monitors and then logs heart activity. While the monitoring and recording parts are not time sensitive, the logging part would be done using a date field - usually using the non-Year 2000 compliant two-digit representation.
So why can't these problems be fixed? Well, they can, but only if someone knows that they exist and fixes them. Not a problem, right? Wrong! Unlike the computer industry, which has been talking about this problem for some time now, many manufacturers are out-in-the dark on this issue. The reason: Many manufacturers never felt the need to possess intimate knowledge of internal computer chips.
To understand this, let us look at how the production process works. Manufacturers often do not produce all of the individual parts that make up their product in house; rather, they receive many parts for their products - including the embedded chips - from a number of different vendors. These embedded chips may have been perceived as something that lay outside of a firm's controls, in some far away production facility. Keeping close tabs on product specifications was never a high priority the way coordinating shipping schedules was.
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