@karsnoordhuis on twitter has found the most expensive thing (so far) on Digikey, a $1.89M Molex tool: www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/molex/0627007100/5152355?s=N4IgTCBcDaIAwDYwHY52QRjSAugXyA

@mysock351C

2 жыл бұрын

Looks like some sort of automated processing machine. Wonder what happens if you just plop in the order, and send them the money? Does an 18-wheeler just show up to your house with a giant camper-sized crate?

@winstonsmith478

2 жыл бұрын

Do they take personal checks?

@hugoboyce9648

2 жыл бұрын

Added to cart.

@tylerethernet8610

2 жыл бұрын

@@hugoboyce9648 Please note it's got bulk packaging. Quoting Digikey, "Bulk refers to a package (usually a bag) of loose unorganized parts, and is usually unsuitable for automated assembly machines".

@anthonywilliams7052

2 жыл бұрын

This sounds like a good video, the most expensive and rarest parts, take a trip to Digikey or some other distributor.

220° tolerance? It might actually survive my crappy soldering skills.

@erlendse

2 жыл бұрын

Totally. No need to unpower it before soldering!

@userPrehistoricman

2 жыл бұрын

Finally we can have a smart soldering iron with electronics on the tip.

@bobwhite137

2 жыл бұрын

Better use the right solder or it might unsolder itself in operation...

@footrotdog

2 жыл бұрын

@@bobwhite137 TIG? :)

@Slartibartfas042

2 жыл бұрын

@@footrotdog LMAO, TIG welding might indeed be best solution to that ;-)

As a Nasa JPL engineer, we used the QML Q and QML V parts all the time. And yeah they're very reliable and expensive parts, but how much is the Mars 2020 rover worth :) Don't forget that you're also using rad-hard parts a lot of the time for space applications, which increases the cost. There's no mechanic in space to help you out so you've only got one chance

@adama7752

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, even airplanes consider ecc and rad-hard. Cost is important, but it's got to function

@phillipchaboya2798

2 жыл бұрын

Triple E parts yay!

@tiftik

2 жыл бұрын

No mechanic in space to help you? Tell that to Hubble!

@rkan2

2 жыл бұрын

I wonder how much radiation hardening the Snapdragon 801 SoC of the Ingenuity helicopter needed :P I'd love to see some teardown of SpaceX flight computer hardware as the rumor is they try to use more off the shelf parts but write their software so that bitflips & rest in single hardware component don't matter. (Actor-Judge) There is interesting reading/presentation I came across "Radiation Effects on ARM Devices" & "ARM Radiation Testing & Collaborations" by Steven M. Guertin from JPL

@chrisheath2637

2 жыл бұрын

"No mechanic in space" Elon "Hold my Gigabeer"....

Rochester specialise in buying up obsolete stock, including bare chips and wafers, and package and test it themselves. They also buy up IC manufacturing masks so they can re-make the chips themselves. In this way, they can charge almost whatever they want for in-demand obsolete parts. I have direct experience in dealing with these guys, they are professional and reliable, but buying from them can COST YOUR SOUL!

@mattmoreira210

2 жыл бұрын

Wow! Just... wow.

@alyoshapearce5985

2 жыл бұрын

I believe that natural law still applies to everything and you will find that they charge up to what the market will tolerate. At some point an Engineer will be tipped over to the point of having to redesign a system. As opposed to just buying a very expensive part. It wouldn't surprise me then a lot of scientific vanity projects require good amounts of philanthropy. So Engineering large scale equipment requires the ability to raise capital from the campaigns department. So not only is there complex electronics. But there's complex Psychology at play. The world is more complex then any individual could Imagine. You don't just wake up in the morning and decide you gonna fly to Mars. Theres a shit load of cocktail parties for very rich people before you get even close to engineering some expensive equipment. So its the mantaning of that equipment after all the cocktail parties are over that drives up the price of the components. It's a giant cycle.

@gusbert

2 жыл бұрын

@@alyoshapearce5985 I'm not sure what your point is here. I have been involved in situation with a micro (Intel 80196) on a last time buy on a product which we are trying to make obsolete, telling purchasing again and again to buy up all the stock of the micro so they can to cover future sales, even though the price has increased from $5 to $20. But look, they say, the price has increased 4X, that's CRAZY! And then, when we are running out, and a big customer insists that we have to sell them more, but by then Intel have stopped making the wafers. Meanwhile, Rochester has stepped in and bought all the stock of wafers and die from Intel and are packaging, testing and selling their version, but it now costs $200 per part. So the profit margins on our product have gone, and this is all my fault? And relax, rant over.

@tomd2917

2 жыл бұрын

Yes had to get some 200K ECL parts made by Rochester to repair a radar recorder - cost a small fortune but only way to do it

@erikscott5709

2 жыл бұрын

By the time you're buying it from Rochester, you're buying a very short run of a semi-custom chip.

11:43 Clicks on a $5000 part, opens datasheet that reads "Low cost" :D

@chrisheath2637

2 жыл бұрын

It's all relative...

@CyberlightFG

2 жыл бұрын

Cheaper than building it yourself

imagine that you let the magic smoke escape of that 52 week lead time part and have to tell it to your manager..... probably the last day on your job...

@meercreate

2 жыл бұрын

At this point they burn the place down and collect the insurance money. Fuck it

@MrFreeElectron

2 жыл бұрын

hah. been there done that. Boss walks in all excited. "I hear we have the wafers for the new prototype. Customer wants samples"... how many ? one , two or all three working ones ( on a batch of 50 6inch wafers... we had 3 working parts. the rest was dead. as i was saying that , the one in the socket went -poof- and then we had two.

You missed the most expensive price “Call for Price”. Some of the most expensive keywords I’ve ever seen are “Radiation Hardened”, “Low Outgassing”, “Guaranteed Performance”, “Individually Fully Characterised”, “ASIC Replacement”, “Safety Critical”, “Qualified”, "NDA" and “Export Restricted”. God forbid you specify a part with all those keywords at once. The most expensive part I’ve ever specified in a design is of course an FPGA, but a pathetically wimpy one in comparison. Whenever I consider any sort of specialised IC, I just think about how much of a pain the export restrictions and NDAs are going to be.

@SeanBZA

2 жыл бұрын

I ordered spare parts that came in at $1 million each, and the sending company sent this ordinary untracked parcel post. Military can be silly expensive, the order was for 10 of them, and each would fit in your hand. They were also NOS items, from the OEM for the unit, though were 10 years later in manufacture date, and had already suffered from component obsolescence in that time, with 4 parts being no longer available, but with equivalent parts instead. They had done exactly the same part substitution as we had done, though they had respun the PCB to fit them better, we had to do a little work to make them fit in the otherwise identical board.

@DUIofPhysics

2 жыл бұрын

@@SeanBZA $10m worth of stock, and they sent it in untracked parcel??

@ColinTimmins

2 жыл бұрын

lol I HATE the "Call for Price" bs... haha, I don't want to go to THAT much effort.

@WizardTim

2 жыл бұрын

@@ColinTimmins I don't get it either, whenever I see "Call for Price" I will pretty much immediately rule out that supplier. Even in the case of highly customizable parts it's much nicer to see "$200 to $500+ ea." than "Call", there are very few situations were a rough estimate can't be provided, usually the "Call" stuff is purely to collect information and allow for call backs. The one I hate the most is websites that make you create an account before they will tell you the price, many test and measurement equipment manufacturers do this, you have to give them all your details before you're automatically emailed a 'quote' and then you'll get emails from their sales department, in all situations I've done this they just told me to buy from a distributor which publicly lists the same price.

@SeanBZA

2 жыл бұрын

@@DUIofPhysics Yes, twice, I got the parcel delivered unopened, and peeling the top label off I saw the original shipping intermediate address. Lots of cancelled stamps, covered with another gummed on sheet of A4 paper, with more cancelled stamps. Remember that De Beers used to send diamonds in the mail, slipping the small packet of diamonds into the massive paper catalogue they used to send every month, to just about every jeweller in the world, and they lost almost none of those tiny little packets of stones, taped to the middle of the catalogue. Only recently did they change to having them delivered by courier. Mail used to be secure, reliable, and safe.

The flash memory is not for a single chip, you get at least one wafer (but they don't say how many chips you get...). That's probably meant for co-packaging together with another chip.

@ionstorm66

2 жыл бұрын

A few thousand atleast, that's still a ton of money for a wafer.

@stuner1337

2 жыл бұрын

@@ionstorm66 Yes, it seems too expensive for a single wafer. Maybe it's for an entire wafer lot.

@iamjadedhobo

2 жыл бұрын

@@stuner1337 Maybe it is the packaging of the wafer that sets the price. Can't just pop it in a padded envelop :)

@Andrew-rc3vh

9 ай бұрын

Isn't it 5000 on a reel?

Regarding the 30 GHz AND gate that was marked as "AND OR" -- the logic inputs and outputs appeared to be differential/complementary, which means you get "NOT" for free (just flip the wires). Since !(!x AND !y) == x OR y, it is indeed true that and AND gate and an OR gate look identical in differential/complementary logic.

@conodigrom

2 жыл бұрын

Now that's what i call a bargain

@ramakrishnapothula7276

2 жыл бұрын

At what Time?

@TheHuesSciTech

2 жыл бұрын

@@ramakrishnapothula7276 18:20

@todayonthebench

2 жыл бұрын

This is indeed a little known secret of logic gates that is fun to utilize in various odd situations. Though, once saw a chip manufacturer state that with their open drain outputs one could make "weird and relations". And that is true to be fair.

@johndododoe1411

2 жыл бұрын

I recall studying those data sheets for a digital radio project, but the PCB size got prohibitive with just 2 gates per chip, even if passing the lower frequency tasks to ordinary CMOS logic.

Hey Dave, at 1 of my previous jobs, I worked on a team that designed projectors using the micro mirror DLPs from TI. These devices are not that expensive when you buy them in volume (which is the only way TI sells them), so this must be someone with a couple of devices left over from a production run and is looking to get rich by selling this to someone who has more money than brains. The most expensive part that I've ever touched was a 4 quadrant photodiode. This is used in spacecraft as the sensor that looks at a reference star and has output that is proportional to brightness offset from the center point. I was the technician who did the mechanical shock test to ensure that the device could survive the ride to space. Each device had to be signed by everyone who touched it. I can't remember the exact price, but it was in the 100's of thousands of dollars. I spent a couple of months testing a whole batch of these, obviously the batch size for these parts was not like the batch size for most parts, I think there was just slightly less than 200 of these devices. So I guess my signature is likely still floating around somewhere up there in the "final frontier". 🙂

@benusberghi5546

2 жыл бұрын

The DLP said UV I believe, might explain some things

@mcconkeyb

2 жыл бұрын

@@benusberghi5546 That's really strange! Why would you want to project a UV image, when no one could see it? But the world is full of really strange things...

@atmel9077

2 жыл бұрын

@@mcconkeyb It's used for 3D printers which use UV to solidify a resin

@niwasox3

2 жыл бұрын

@@atmel9077 You can also use UV-capable DLPs to expose lithography masks, or go maskless entirely: kzread.info/dash/bejne/gKyuwaeHntDNpKw.html

@mcconkeyb

2 жыл бұрын

@@atmel9077 Based on the limited resolution and ridiculous price, personally I'd find a better way to do this.

As well remember Sinclair Research was experimenting with wafer scale complete systems, where they wanted to fit all of the memory, support and processor circuitry, along with every single peripheral you can think of, onto a single 300mm wafer, with rows of wire bonds going across the top of the wafer to provide interconnections where needed, and another set of heavier bond wires to provide the power it needed. The space grade comes with a serial number on the box, and each chip has been tested for 1000 hours at elevated temperature, plus has had the whole bake and shake done to each. You can trace it back to the actual region of the mine, where each individual shovel full of ore came out. Comes with a booklet of pages with all this attached, though probably there is a digital record now for this, supplied with each delivery.

@TheBackyardChemist

2 жыл бұрын

Cerebras is doing exactly that right now, an entire full sized wafer filled with logic and SRAM, on a TSMC 7nm process. The price is around a few MUSD/unit.

@gerryjamesedwards1227

2 жыл бұрын

@@TheBackyardChemist Yes, and each wafer is housed in it's own huge great water-cooling and power delivery unit, the size of a chest freezer. Each one uses a couple of kilowatts. Crazy stuff.

@tommihommi1

2 жыл бұрын

@@gerryjamesedwards1227 you're a bit off on the power, it's like 20kW

@gerryjamesedwards1227

2 жыл бұрын

@@tommihommi1 you're right! Blimey.

@nameredacted1242

2 жыл бұрын

So... You get what you paid for then?

the 200-210C max temperature is needed in electronics that are located inside oilwell drill heads, the grinding of rock produces masses of heat and if electronics can take 200C instead of 125C you can drill faster or use less coolant and it becomes cheap to buy 10-100K telemetrics if you can run the drill faster and thus generate more holes per given time.

@keylanoslokj1806

2 жыл бұрын

Do you work in such a platform?

@Paul_VK3HN

2 жыл бұрын

Well I guess they don't use regular solder on boards inside drill heads?

@D0nK3yDon

2 жыл бұрын

@@Paul_VK3HN yes. Sn96 for 150C and HMP above 185c

The datasheet headline at 11:50 really had me laughing "LOW COST ADC" at $4000

I remember paying $3,000 for a 1980's through whole PWM chip used on an old power supply design i was modifying for my previous employer. The chip was out of production, but a local fab bought the die. basically had to pay for the price of the full wafer for 1 chip.

@userPrehistoricman

2 жыл бұрын

Might as well have got them to make a whole wafer, unless they did it on a shuttle?

@losttownstreet3409

2 жыл бұрын

There are some company which buy leftover wavers from IC which get out of production. The but these in storage and ... had to pay for the whole operation with a handfull of orders a year. Many times it's cheaper to redesign but sometimes for one repair 3000$ isn't much.

7:45 warehouse staff almost certainly don't see the part value - delivery notes never have prices for the same reason.

@EEVblog

2 жыл бұрын

Yeah, likely a pick sheet. One google search away though.

@funtechu

2 жыл бұрын

I always wonder about that with international shipments since many carriers put the values from the commercial invoice right on the label. Thankfully DHL supports digital commercial invoices now so that at least makes me feel a bit better.

@madscientist741

2 жыл бұрын

@@EEVblog coming from an aeronautical service background. You usually try to not look up how much something you're grabbing, because last time that single turbine vane was 10k. You could totally stick 10 in your lunchbox, but then sell them to who haha.

@pauldriscoll5010

2 жыл бұрын

A lot of the value for aviation parts is the paperwork trail and the traceability that goes with it incase something goes wrong

@danishdart

2 жыл бұрын

@@EEVblog Pickers are under the pump to stay within their KPI and have their picks done before a certain time which for small parts might be over 100 lines per hour. When you have 30 seconds to pick an exact amount of parts and you have to To do that 100 times within the next hour or so; I can promise you, You don't give a flying fuck about the individual parts . The returns department might have a better chance of knowing the value of parts.

If Dave was more like other youtubers, the next video would be called "Spending $10,000 on just 20 electronic components". We'd then also get "Most expensive, GOLD 555 TIMER!!! OMG! REAL!!".

@oldguy9051

2 жыл бұрын

He's already halfway there as he makes a stupid face for the thumbnail like those other 'tubers...

@MichaelOfRohan

2 жыл бұрын

@@oldguy9051 I do not blame him for that. Its statistically and publicly proven that a human face in the thumbnail is over 40% more likely to be prioritized under youtubes recommendation algorithm.

@MichaelOfRohan

2 жыл бұрын

Wait, a gold and ceramic 555 ic?? That i would watch, so long as it was home made!

@Abihef

2 жыл бұрын

I can easily spend that on four😂 Was searching for resistors round 860-2300 ohm ranging from 20-46 watt the other day. Lot of 2600 euro parts there😂😂 Was quite surprised when the first parts popped up, thank god I found widap 50 watt resistors but most values were 600 and up😮😂 Roughly 3200-3500 Yankee bucks BTW😮

Yes we are stuck paying about $100 for a stupid TI 3.3v 5v level shifter that used to cost 60cents! Need to do a whole board design to use a China jellybean unit which involves a whole RF re certification... The market has gone crazy.

I worked for one of the first companies to build intelligent well completion systems. At the time this was unheard of, to build a redundant computer system that went into a high temp oil well and stayed there forever. At the time many manufacturers had scaled back mil-spec and Space-spec manufacturing. Rochester and Micro-semi would take standard die and package them and test them to those specs for us. I used to joke that there was more high tech stuff in our tools than your average satellite. And it was only a mild exxaggeration....

Working at Digi-Key and picking a $20,000 part off the shelf must be an experience akin to working at a museum or historic site. "Don't drop those candlesticks, they're insured for 10,000 pounds," said the chaplain of Clare College, Cambridge, to me one day when I was helping tidy up their historic chapel after the last concert of the year. Surely some of these are manufactured on demand to fulfill a contract made 30 years ago requiring the part to remain available for 30 years, or something like that, and they are rather hoping nobody orders them.

@isaackvasager9957

2 жыл бұрын

Having worked there, I can tell you that it's definitely not akin to working at a museum or historic site, haha. (It is a great place though) And most of these really expensive parts are non-stock. They are usually drop shopped from the manufacture. Digi-Key is just handling the money exchange.

@seanb3516

2 жыл бұрын

When I was working research we had shelves of Swagelok parts. Everything they had basically. We would help ourselves to what we wanted and each week a sales rep would restock everything for us. It was wonderful :D

@michael.a.covington

2 жыл бұрын

@@seanb3516 They must have wanted you to design things that contained their parts and would be manufactured by the millions. Or invent things that used their parts and would be built by others.

I did this exact exercise years ago and the one I found was a ~US$270k chip designed to detect nuclear explosions from orbiting satellites. Surprised it was public and had datasheet available. IIRC it detected the xrays or emp emitted and used extremely precise timing with multiple satellites to triangulate where it was detonated. Went back later to find it but was gone, ITAR probably got to them.

@zakofrx

2 жыл бұрын

Similar thing happend with a Chemical Weapon. The US goverment patented it and everyone could view it.. A while ago due to internet patent access they removed the patent from public access but its still online on other sites..

@atmel9077

2 жыл бұрын

You must be joking????!!!!! If there's a datasheet somewhere it may be on the Internet Archive

@johndododoe1411

2 жыл бұрын

The public GPS specifications included a public bit indicating "nuclear detonation detected", but I'm unsure if it's still provided by the new block III satellites.

One of my friends worked in the space industry. He once travelled to the us and had parts in his hand luggage. He also had the invoice with him for tax purposes. The lady that handled his luggage in the custom inspection just had one question. "Could I please the cable that costs 30,000 US$." It was about 30 cm cable that had been tested under the most extreme conditions and had a certification spec the size of a Gideon bible.

Everyone who sells online knows what this really is. When you have a listing, say, with Ebay or Amazon or Aliexpress, or whatever online marketplace, whenever you're _temporarily_ out of stock, if you fail to ship, you get fined by the platform, but if you take the item down, you lose the valuable search engine indexing. So, what you do, is just set the price ridiculously high so that no-one orders it, but it's still there. On the other hand, if some weirdo _does_ order it, you just buy it from your competitor at whatever price and make a great sale. ;) Everyone does it, really. I thought it was obvious.

@14:10 around 15 years ago, i worked with such components. A lot of work involved. Remove outer package. Get IC out the inner package. Tin the leads with a special setup. Cut the corner pieces. (with a side cutter, or, depended of the size of the IC, a special cutter on a small special press.) On a special press, bent and cut the leads. Place it on a tray, so they can use it on a pic-and-place machine.

The really important thing about space-rated parts is that they're radiation hardened & stay within spec over ludicrously large temperature ranges, which is really, really hard to achieve, plus they're all tested to meet spec. All these factors are very expensive to achieve, & require throwing away a large percentage of the parts during factory testing for not meeting spec.

That's actually a pretty cool format. I love obscure parts and packages, I would definately watch more episodes if you want to make it a small series.

That first regulator was only available on a 70pc minimum order... gotta count that in the purchase price! Rochester buys up mfgr inventory, along with full wafers, masks, testing equipment, etc... when they want more parts, they will dice up and package a wafer or two... and they can test to OEM specs. Don't bother asking them for 68060's though... the Amiga bois bought all them up ages ago. BTW... *everything* is 52 weeks lead time... giant PITA, we're buying up boards off of eBay and scalping the processors off them for our production.

@diemaschinedieviereckigeei2941

2 жыл бұрын

And the prices for 68060s sky-rocketed in the last 12 months :(

@NiHaoMike64

2 жыл бұрын

@@diemaschinedieviereckigeei2941 How big of a FPGA would be needed to emulate one? Perhaps there's a market for a FPGA on an adapter board preprogrammed to work as a 68060?

@diemaschinedieviereckigeei2941

2 жыл бұрын

@@NiHaoMike64 In fact there is an FPGA version, called Apollo 68080. The FPU part is quite large, but according to their website the whole design fits into an Altera Cyclone V. It mainly targets Amiga accelerator cards.

20:30 You should order a huge quantity of those damn 4MB SPI flash chips and hope that DigiKey has an integer overflow on the price and so you pay nothing or even better they refund -4.3 billion into your debit card 🤣

Some of the lead frame stuff is intended for high G force application. Rochester hold surplus die, and package on demand, for a lot of stuff. Functional verification and burn in test, too. They also hold military stuff for contractual reasons - a lot of military contracts state an availability duration, which can be 30 years in some cases, and sometimes has a mandated stock level.

@XantheFIN

2 жыл бұрын

Ugh just shy short for F22 Raptor.

These DLPs are used for XUV lithography. Very rare still currently. And this RF spectrometer asic is a aerospace radar component. I wonder if someone did an oopsie that this is even on the list... ;) Might be your only chance to get one!

20:25 the really expensive memories say "wafer", are they maybe that expensive because they'll ship you not 1 chip, but 1 entire wafer? no clue how many they can fit on there.

Most of these blow anything I've ever worked with personally out of the water. The most expensive single component I've ever actually held in person was a superluminescent diode used for OCT imaging of peoples retinas. That was still below $10,000 USD but I can at least say I've worked with a more expensive LED than just about anyone else.

Regarding those leadframe packages. It is very common fom space-grade stuff to ship in this form. And some test batches of ic's come in tis package as well. I guess this is because each chip is wirebonded manualy or it is somehow linked with manufacturing/testing process. And yes, this package allows you some freedom of mounting, but usually datasheet limits your monting way. It is huge pain in the ass to form those leads before soldering.

@JeffreyBoye

2 жыл бұрын

Indeed, I work in aerospace and can attest to the annoyance of lead forming. Requires specialty tooling and skilled technicians, not to mention a careful and precise toe-toe distance to get the bends "just right".

@johnnylavoie

2 жыл бұрын

One reason for this is they don't want to the responsibility for the mechanical mounting of the chip. The PCB designer/integrator will normally run a suite of mechanical simulation with the IC to ensure the vibration and shock requirements are met.

The ceramic frame is used to keep the flat pack leads from bending during handling and fitting into test sockets. Typically removed by the end user or during lead forming. May also help with handling during wire bonding.

Like the way that the Analog Devices datasheet for the AD2S44 describes it as "low cost" (£1,163.66 in UK).

I used to work at Digi-Key...Hi...from Thief River Falls.

NCTB appears to stand for non-conductive tie bar. I can't find any information on applications that require this sort of package.

That one FPGA was the last one of an obsolete part too. So if you destroy one then suddenly it was actually priceless.

Didn’t exactly “spec it in” but reviewed the bill of materials as part of IT and helped with the testing and manufacturing process for a 38k solid gold paveway smart bomb circuit board. At the time because the company was spread between walking distance of three other buildings you could just steal them by loading them onto a tray and walking them to your car. Sort of a side note but I don’t think most people realized what was being made there and they had no cameras or door badge readers at the time. Also at the time management didn’t want to pay for the really expensive components so they called around and got substandard aero space substitutes. Horrible to think what the shortages are causing for them now. They used wave form soldering for a lot of stuff at the time. Kinda cool place actually but ancient as far as manufacturing goes.

I’ve used many of TI’s HT lineup for downhole designs. The parts you saw were unformed so you can lead form to your own specs. Some choose to mount them dead bug (upside down) and glue the mass down to the board down to survive higher vibration rather than suspending the mass by the leads.

CQFP (Ceramic Quad Flat Pack) is usually used in space applications, for FPGAs and processors (like Cobham Gaisler Leon 2 or 3 for example). It mitigates the risk introduced by vibrations during the launch.

@keylanoslokj1806

2 жыл бұрын

Is the launch harsher than the escape from the atmosphere?

@Necrocidal

2 жыл бұрын

@@keylanoslokj1806 Launch is extremely violent, especially for vehicles designed for unmanned missions - the shock and sustained vibrations would probably some liquify human tissues. Once you're out of the atmosphere, you only have thermal and ionizing radiation to deal with. Your main _mechanical_ issue in space is probably just thermal expansion/contraction, unless you have a propulsion system too or you're below ~350km orbit. [I used to design space software + test hardware]

@keylanoslokj1806

2 жыл бұрын

@@Necrocidal i guess the cost of those parts is accessible only to country tier budgets... .

@Necrocidal

2 жыл бұрын

@@keylanoslokj1806 if you're not going too far from the earth, you can get by with jellybean parts and redundancy. Nanosatellites take this approach but without the redundancy. For smaller satellites going to lower altitudes, it's cheaper to put 5 satellites up with jellybean parts and no internal redundancy, than to put one up with space-grade parts and triple redundant subsystems. Chance of all 5 failing before end of life will be pretty low, unless there's a design flaw. Lower cost means you can replace them every few years as they deorbit, allowing upgrades of a fleet/constellation. With big expensive space-grade satellites, that's not an option (without the shuttle programme).

@keylanoslokj1806

2 жыл бұрын

@@Necrocidal interesting. thanks.

Back in the mid '80s I was building LN2 cooled Dewar CCD cameras. Some of the CCDs we used were actually made by a team of engineers. One of a kind.

That $128k flash chip was actually a wafer.

I remember buying a Xilinx Vertex 2 for USD1600/- about 15years back. It was a prototype board for a client who vanished into thin air after the successful demo. did not even get paid for it. :(

Your browser ads are going to be rather extreme now.

You should take a look at what the most expensive **connectors** are too. I poked around a bit and was able to find connectors going for $22k each, though there's so many categories I'm sure that's not even the most expensive one.

Crazy to think that 1 chip can cost as much as a house lol. Imagine getting the pins mixed up on the workbench and letting the magic smoke out. :o

Recently been working on high temp downhole projects. Those high temp TI microcontrollers are pretty standard. They end up being a tiny fraction of the instrument cost, so no big deal.

@userPrehistoricman

2 жыл бұрын

I was looking at high temp MCUs a little while back too. For some reason they only offer crappy low-end stuff for £600 like Cortex-M0.

@Paul_VK3HN

2 жыл бұрын

Do you use high temperature solder 🤔?

Robert Feranec of Fedevel Academy had a chat with someone involved in space related electronics. One of the topics they covered was parts on lead frames. One of the things that was mentioned was that the leads would be formed to custom shapes or dimensions using a custom jig by the people doing the installation, rather than the shape/dimensions being specified by the manufacturer. I guess that means you can achieve very specific mechanical properties? Way beyond my understanding though.

The most expensive parts I've come across are Sony V-FETs: 2SJ18 (source +, Gate -) and 2SK60 (source -, gate +). They're used in my TAN-5550 amplifier. The price is difficult to determine because they're so rare now. Nelson Pass may be the only person who has them.

What the datasheet says about the "obscure Honeywell jobbie" @13:57 : "Typically, parts will operate up to +300ºC for a year, with derated performance"

@chrisheath2637

2 жыл бұрын

Enough to melt the heart of the most hardened IC...

I ordered 50k of an 0201 cap for a project and they sent me 500k by mistake. bless them

I recently had to design in a $350 Schottky diode. That was for a space-level application though.

I've seen a Mitutoyo has a gage block set for 100K USD for 40pcs set on Grainger. There is no limit on small tools/comps.

Leaves me wondering about value of some of my 1970s ICs stock, including quite a few in white ceramic and gold leads. UA 723 must have nearly a dozen, Some parts were high cost at introduction, the uA741 OpAmp when released by Fairchild was noted at US$41.00 each in the first adverts in 1968/69 ads. The uA709 OpAmp that needed external comp cap was a bit cheaper but still around $20.00. Just mindboggling given prices of such, and better OpAmps these days. 4K Dynamic RAM from Intel were over $20.00 each mid 1970s. So many ancient parts in my stock might carry good prices. There was a time NASA was buying old 2716, 2732 EPROMS via US consulate at about $25 as they needed parts on shuttle and other space needs. Had friend approach me for mine at $5 offer, until I found out his game, was to profit greatly, as mine were brand new and would get better than $25, as that was for pre used parts. No way did he get mi e, but also I sold none. Have TI colour TV chips, and other special function parts, and early uProcessors.

You laugh about ATMegas, but recently, legless atmega328p's have been pound for pound, more expensive than gold.

My guess before watching the video - the priciest parts will probably be space-grade or Radiation Hardened

Those UV DMDs are a special version which is in a special UV transparent window made of fused silica, rather than glass.

18:35 You can choose between and/or by swapping pos. and neg. signal pins. So the two inputs are inverted and the output is inverted.

Interestingly the low end of the temperature spec usually induces the most mechanical stress on a lot of these packages.

Well it’s cheaper to buy an expensive part than for the government to qualify a new version of a card or system. Plus the logistics tail adds additional cost. Just saying simple board respin cost an easy million. Big picture view of change will justify spending 130k on a Xilinx part if it’s lead free having that part reballed and stored in nitrogen until needed. Anymore I tell contractors just buy trays or reels even if we are building 70 cards. I tell the young engineer select the largest FPGA because it’s cheaper than having him spend weeks trying to meet timing requirements or to make something fit. Yes it seems wasteful but it totally saves money. It was shocking for me when I switched from designing Elmo’s (.87 cost limit) to DoD.

Dallas Semiconductor DS5000, Cost about $80 in 1994 when I used it in a casino game design.

Before anyone laughs too much at the DLP mirror-arrays for projectors, consider this: Audi are using them in their current top-spec EVs. A few steps on from using LED arrays for "smart" dipping headlamps. They do all sorts of fancy things with the lights, but are mostly there for the bling and to show off. Nevertheless, you can bet your bottom (ten thousand-) dollars that they will move down the ranges, and other manufacturers are already using prototypes. Between DLP lamps and LCD panels in the instruments / entertainment unit, the future of guaranteed car obsolescence is assured.

@eevblog It would be great to interview an experienced guy at Rochester ... they might have great stories about clients problems, unusual requests etc

21:19 Designed for UV light. That's probably why it's 100x the price of a normal DLP chip. Probably used for 3D resin printers or something.

Seen those ceramic ICs a plenty in Soviet military electronics back at my school days. I believe Western military tech use the same packages. It is crazy what is happening in semiconductor market now. Niece accidentally poured a glass of water over her Acer Nitro 5 laptop. Fried BQ24781 battery controller. That chip is available from Mouser or Digikey only by tall order with delivery at end of March 2022. Otherwise the only possibility is chips ripped from used motherboards from China.

Digikey once picked the wrong part... It wasn't $100,000 but "only" 50, a voltage buck converter. They apologized, sent me what I had ordered an let me keep the strange part. The ATmega64 is a space grade one. Lovely kit.

LOL, I have bought a literal NOR gate that had a price tag of over $300 .. not kidding. The chip was so simple that I was able to reverse engineer the silicon under a microscope (it was an Epitaxial, planar, RTL DCTL process with only 3 NPN BJT transistors etched into its die, which were pre-silicon-gate tech, i.e. alloy-based BJTs). True story!

I'd imagine at least one application for those lead frame packages is so that whoever's purchasing them can slice and bend the leads themselves into a semi-custom footprint -- to allow some kind of high-reliability routing thing perhaps.

Most expensive chip I handled in production was priced at 2k$ us. A precision 16-bit A/D converter used in photon counting for a science camera. I wasn’t allowed to handle the 30k$ Back illuminated thinned CCDs.

I've seen those packages of 15:53 at the Space Research center of the Netherlands. They cost $$$$$$ and came with a 1000+ bookwork of how to cut the leads and my colleague told me the machine to cut them was even more expensive. So it is being used for space applications, but I can't remember what the advantage of this method was!

The lead frame are just here for ESD reasons during transport. All IOs and pins connected together. The kiss cool effect is that you have to cut (and bend) the leads as you wish and place the component on a footprint you've qualified beforehand ... Oh obviously the leads are golded and needs to be de-golded and tinned (no lead free rubbish here !) Prior to mounting.

That xor gate reminds me of when I was designing a frequency counter for a test equipment maker, using differential PECL logic. Fun times.

@18:30, That differential in and out gate is actually and AND and an OR combined. If you swap the differential input's +&-, IE the polarity of the input data, the AND becomes an AND with inverted inputs, or in other words, a NOR gate. Then, what do you assume happens to that NOR gate when you swap the +&- on the outputs?

If you have this old bit of military, space or bank equipment, that is critical for your business, and you need that Intel chip, then the $180k is a nothing amount to pay. think of the Voyager computer systems back on Earth, where they cannot easily replace it with modern stuff, because it is going to cost more to develop it than the price from Rochester for the spare parts.

@KeanM

2 жыл бұрын

Makes you wonder how much Rochester paid for the parts when Intel or whoever decided to get rid of their remaining stock after the last time to buy run. Thankfully many of these small items wouldn't take much warehouse space, but I guess 1,500 Xeon chips in packaging would be a few large boxes on a shelf. Rochester say the have over 15 billion devices in their warehouse.

@SeanBZA

2 жыл бұрын

@@KeanM Probably the price each was the price for the lot, purchased for a little more than the gold price of the chips inside

@AdamMansbridge

2 жыл бұрын

The organisation I work for (in government service delivery) had a letter formatting system that was based on an ISA card that had to live in a PC from back when they had ISA slots My team spent a few months moving all the letters that that system produced to a more modern system to remove the dependency on every more expensive PC parts

@harrysnell8971

2 жыл бұрын

yeah Rochester specialise in maintaining availability of obsolete parts

The honeywell parts make sense, because you are basically paying for an absurd amount of reliability and warrantee. also, those prices are always going to be higher because the defense industry can buy them, and they have deeper pockets. you can get a gyro from honeywell for thousands of dollars too, which is crazy compared to the little gyros you can get that go in your phone. The flat earthers famously got a honeywell gyro to measure earth rate (15 deg per hour) and they measured it pretty exactly as you'd expect with a gyro that good. Earth rate is actually a little higher than 15, and its closer to 15.041067 using wolfram. The better your gyro, the more the cost and the more accurate your measurement of earth rate will be (not considering the clock you would need)

So, that crazy expensive ATMEGAS64 is, unsurprisingly, designed for aerospace with a bunch of communications stuff built in. Also rad hardened, traceable, and all the goodies.

I recently soldered some boards that had $6/piece 0805 resistors. Perfect little white ceramic blocks.

I'm working at a company that dealt with Rochester electronics to get an EOL part that was impossible to find at trustworthy sources (a TLC540IN analog to digital converter), you can deal with them directly if necessary without going through digikey. Seems Rochester also has the capacity to "revive" some obsolete components, like re-producing some 8051 processors based on Philips/NXP designs in dip-40 packages

At 5:56, that plastic thing is a caddy flatpak devices ship in to prevent the leads getting damaged.

For the TL432, it would be way cheaper to hire someone to painstakingly extract the die out of a SOT-23 package.

Those hybrid synchro resolvers can get down to 1.5mrad of accuracy, which means about beam width for a average pulsed laser that isn't running some crazy high beam quality. So that's why they are used on arty fire control etc.

Dave, thanks for that analysis. Going off at a slight tangent - National Semiconductor stated in every Databook that "National's products are not authorised for use as a critical component in life support devices or systems ... "without the express permission of then President of the company , Charles E. Sporck. Components for Military and Aerospace applications underwent additional functional and reliability testing and personnel had to undergo special screening to be allowed within that division.

7:56 As someone living in Minnesota who has visited TRF many times... 21K would be doable to live on but it would be far from comfortable. I would not be surprised, however, if that were more than half of the median income in the city and surrounding area (Minnesota is a very ag-centric state and TRF is in the heart of corn/sugar beet/sunflower country in the NW quadrant).

I suspect the lead frame is included in some of these expensive chips as typical soldering methods don't work (since the chip has to withstand 220C that's already near the melting temperature of the solder). So the chip is supplied in lead frame assembly so it can be affixed on the ceramic PCB using different techniques (spot welding each leg?)

Rochester is making parts too. They recently resurrected the Motorola 68030, and are fabbing new chips.

Man, I'm never trashing any older gear again without checking the ICs. Some of the prices on legacy chips is nuts. I had no idea.

Great video, the mil-spec stuff is fun. It always amuses me to think about some contractor with an exclusive contract to support some equipment from the 70s or 80s. Like some piece of equipment on a B-52 bomber or navy submarine. Part of me thinks it'd be amazing to be one of the few people in the world with the knowledge to repair and maintain that equipment.

Some of these are probably also chemically resistant packages. That's the reason a lot of the mil-spec ones are ceramic or exotic polymers. A lot of mil-spec PCBs are coated with a two-part resin after they are built for additional environmental hardening. The packages have to be able to stand up to chemicals like acetone to survive the coating process.

That TL431 bare die is only about $200 from TI, so DigiKey's markup is huge. But the price makes some sense, since you're not likely to be ordering single dies for anything but prototyping and fine-tuning your manufacturing process, so you're almost certainly contacting TI directly and working out a sales & support deal. The sorts of companies using bare dies in their devices are pretty much always making huge numbers of parts, so the prototype/dev kit stuff is stupid expensive but the final BoM cost is lower.

The DMDs are used for 3D printing and computer generated holograms! The DMD can be used as a spatial light modulator, basically an optical binary phased array

This one's a beaut, Dave. Love the "weird ass shit"

You can do the same DSP processing using an UDOO RYZEN BOLT V1000 Maker Board SBC, 2x ADC's and 2x DAC's (sorry for shouting)

I don't think those lead frames are to be mounted in a socket (except for testing), they are most likely built like that with the fancy ceramic insulators to allow electrical testing at high temperature/vacuum, but would still be cut off during final mounting. Aerospace hardware often uses exotic soldering and attachment methods so it makes sense they offer them without any lead finishing.

16:49 DESC (Defense Electronic Supply Columbus) style data sheets are wonky on account of being so rigidly standardized. Standard drawings scarce get used for anything beyond mapping mfr P/N to military PIN for procurement. Recently changed jobs from a DMSMS role which included parsing several of these on the daily. Glad I don’t have to stare into that void any more.

My father worked for General Dynamics ATS - I have a radar channel processor loaded with golden chips - It has 12 large packages from DDC before they went bankrupt. I was told the value of each chip was in the 6 Figure Range. Also for the time it was made, early 1980s it had multi-megabyte dram chips! I wonder how much those cost? lol

Let's all wish for the most obscure just under $100 IC at this year's #digiwish and confuse them and the other participants.

It says DIE, so they probably sell you the whole wafer. They'll also send you a die map which indicates which die are bad. Depending on wafer size and die size, you're likey to get 1000 to 2000 die. You then need scribe equipment to singulate, etc. This is not for the DIYer, that's for sure. It also says 70 non-stock, meaning you need to place an order and they'll get right on it. :-)

@mieszkogulinski168

8 ай бұрын

Is it intended for direct bonding with PCB under a plastic blob?

Let’s build a of the shelf Venus rover using digi key parts !

I think the biggest shock i got from looking at expensive components were some precision potentiometers on mouser, the were sexy, but very expensive 😂

The price listing for the first regulator is unreasonable. $1,653.729. If it was only $1,653.728 I would have ordered a few, but I'm not paying that extra tenth of a cent. Profiteers!