[TenTec] ORION II end of production

[Pfizenmayer]

I have watched these comments for a couple days now and do not see any 
comments about what can happen and probably has happened to TenTec with 
respect to parts supply.

I worked in a product group of a major semiconductor manufacturer for about 
30 years and can surmise what has happened.

Semi manufacturers will look at what sales have been on  given product lines 
and have a rule of thumb  which will vary in the full details but basically 
is a rule based on looking at a given group of products - in this case take 
an example of  the ex Motorola / now Freescale Dragon Ball CPU in the 
Orion.(I do not know this is the particular case - just an example)

When a product line in a group is identified that is x percent of sales for 
that line - say only 10 percent in $$ of all sales for that line , then 
"management " will order the product group to issue an "end of life " 
announcement and give customers a chance to make a "lifetime buy" and give 
them usually a year or less to place  and take delivery on  those orders. At 
that point the customer has little they can  do but just suck it up and try 
to figure out what they need for the "lifetime" and order and hold the 
inventory. Another option is a major re-design to use a later part . But 
since Orion is somewhere between 8 and 10 years in its life cycle and the 
designs were probably pretty firm a year or so before that - that is a long 
time in semiconductor life.  Sometimes  , the semi manufacturer will allow 
some smaller semi outfit to produce the parts - but there are a lot of what 
ifs and gotchas in that with respect to giving away processing "secrets" - 
and even worse it can be hard to really duplicate all the characteristics 
for a given device to be able to drop into a socket- especially at RF.

So bottom line is I would not be surprised at all if TenTec is not faced 
with a really serious issue in getting many of the  parts and having to 
maintain a huge inventory cost burden for best guess at production plus 
spares needs.

It really pained me many times when we had a great relationship with a 
customer , especially smaller ones (in terms of small compared to GM or Ford 
etc ) and we were forced to issue end of life and I knew whatv the 
ramifications of that  really were . (And sometimes even the GMs and Fords 
etc are faced with this sort of thing - much gnashing of teeth all around).



73 Hank K7HP