Proffieboard V3

The V3 design is not public yet.
Also, the parts are very difficult to find right now.

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Ok, so i will be patient.

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Did you hear the bad news TSMC and global Foundary are increasing their prices for Chips by about 20٪ this bodes very bad for all electronics

Well I can’t say I’m at all surprised given the current demand and shortage of supply.
But yes it will be bad for the consumer market as it will inevitably drive prices up and maybe put some things out of reach for many people.
Let’s hope it does not last long🤞

TSMC increasing their prices is one of two things that can potentially get us out of the chip shortage, so I think it’s a good thing. I just happen to think it’s a too little too late. ST has already raised their prices between 100 to 1000 percent, so I don’t think TSMC raising their prices by 20% is going to make much of a difference.

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when have you ever known any business to drop prices after they have gone up because of demand? it’s a good thing in that there may be more components but I doubt the prices will go down.

Prices go down when they loose business to competition. Note that this can never happen as long as they are at production capacity.

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The chip industry is totes not a cartel!

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The chip industry is nearly a monoply since TSMC makes more than 50% of ALL chips in the entire world.

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That’s fab industry. Chip is designed, sent for manufacturing, packaged, and commercialized. Chip industry is now limited by it’s main input: fab capacity. As soon as this is solved, chip designers will have to compete again on features and price. BTW, if we take this as 2019 to 2024, in those five years some patents will have lapsed and a new fab generation introduced. So, in three years we will see really cheap chips again.

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There’s is that except they are also increasing pricing and really there’s only 2 fab company TSMC and Global Foundry

The latest News Max magazine (Sep, pg 18) has a good article on the chip shortage. It wasn’t overflowing with optimism.

Fab market is a lot more than PC CPU. Nobody has more than 10% of the market. Particularly for embedded, it’s usually a different set of producers. I think TI and SMC even have their own fabs. One interesting point of all this problem is that the auto manufacturers are trying to get their own dedicated supply lines including the fabs. TMSC is building fabs in Europe and Japan for this. Europe and USA are making plans to subsidize local fab capacity. So it might take a while, but we will probably see a fab excess in three to five years.

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Interesting. I was curious as to what was going on. So what’s the latest? Are there absolutely no chips available, or can small batches be procured at a premium?

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The chips are allocated so even if we could get them they’d be 3 times the cost.

Im in the industry once removed. By next Summer (Northern hemisphere) we expect things to be pretty close to normal.

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I’m so excited! Thank you to all the contributors on the V3 and OS6. It’s going be an awesome combination!

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While designing the TeensySaber V4, I discovered something interesting: The pFET that is used for the reverse-polarity protection can very easily be used to cut the power to the board, and then you can use any switch, regardless of how small to control it. Basically it removes the need for high-power kill switches. However, in order to make it workable, I would need to add a 3-way solder bridge to the board, which I don’t know if I actually have room for. The default would be for the board to work the same as today, but if you cut one side of the solder bridge and connect the other with a wire, then the board wouldn’t turn on until that wire is connected to GND through a switch. This would be very similar to the circuit I use inside the control box of my K4 saber:

https://fredrik.hubbe.net/lightsaber/k4/control.html

I guess my question is; is this something that people would use?

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Forgive me if I’m wrong but would this mean the blade would be isolated this way?
Also when you say “use any switch, regardless of size” would this mean we could use a micro latching switch with say 200mA switch current (or less)?

If so then I think this is a good idea if you can squeeze it into the v3 board.
Would certainly help with the cost of the high power switches normally used as a kill switch.
Would also help with reducing the space required to have a kill switch which is alway a bonus!

No, the blade would not be isolated, it would rely on the LED FETs to turn it off.

Yes, that is exactly what I did on the K4 control box PCB.

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