Dennis,
You cannot make firmware updates forever, after you exceed the available
memory for such.
The microprocessors regularly go out of date, and semiconductor
manufacturers discontinue their availability for another reason, such that a
company would cease development of new features for a mature design facing
parts shortages, or unavailability after a couple years.
The whole business model is; you sell the design until there are so many
newer capabilities available in newer components that you must put aside
upgrading, and concentrate on learning how to design with the newest chips
and concepts to put out a new model.
Computers have only a 3 year lifetime or less, today for this reason.
Radios having mainly micro computers in them, cannot last much longer, in
the shifting parts markets of today.
There is always a price point tradeoff in selecting how much memory to
incorporate, and thus program space in a computer driven product. Power to
heat up unused memory can also be a factor. There are always software
breakthrus that come along, and the whole DSP approach can change. The
future generations of radios will undoubtedly depart from conventional
design plus DSP and have high frequency Analog to Digital conversion in the
front end, with detection and filtering moving more to the digital domain.
It takes time to ramp up a quiet A/D design, without ground problems and
spurious operations. It is a major departure from all the radio designs we
have seen before. Concepts such as the software defined radio have their
limits and are radically different from traditional design, and as such,
need much development before being bullet proof.
-Stuart
K5KVH
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