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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (196107)	2/10/2023 6:06:40 PM
From: maceng2	1 Recommendation Recommended By Pogeu Mahone Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217802

Military grade & high reliability chips are typically one or more chip generations older then front line commercial chips. That is why upgrading semiconductor fabs can be such a challenge. The business case for the commercial products is easy to make but often the military and hi reliability products pay the big bucks and they never want anything changed... and for very good reasons. The amount of money made on high reliability chips indicates to me that the products will always be available, through official channels or not. The packaging and testing are often enhanced, lower grade chips are weeded out, but often the high reliability chip are otherwise identical to the commercial grade. I would guess there will be ample chips available once the price is attractive. A small cost differential compared to the total cost of the tank, missile, plane or whatever. I recently removed the lid off an Intel 486 SX from the 1990's. I kept it as a souvenir from the Compaq Presario I had to finally let go of. Unlike modern processors where all you will see is the back silicon surface, the whole circuit is there to see complete with gold bond wires. I am going to embed it in epoxy resin and it will make a wonderful keep sake and paper weight. Even back then the minimum geometries were about a micron. The chip was 33 megahertz CMOS and consumed 2 watts of power. That is why no one had to worry much about Heat Sinks back then. It had about 1.2 million transistors on it. All this would be more then sufficient processing power for the most advanced military systems today. Analog chips are typically lower tech & larger geometries too. i486SX-25 - Intel - WikiChip