Embedded Technology
Counterfeit Mitigation: The Trouble with “Tagging”
August 21, 2013
When the subject of counterfeit mitigation and avoidance comes up you generally find a couple of areas that people focus on: standards, test/inspection, and tagging. Tagging can involve many things, including specially etched marks, marks that show up only under certain lights, rare earth tags, and DNA tags. In general, these marks rely one or…
Arrow ACT Masters: An Environment of Innovation
July 10, 2013
GDCA enjoyed the privilege of being a part of this year’s Arrow Electronics ACT Masters 2013 in Denver CO. Arrow’s technical sales force was trained in a centralized fashion while suppliers got a first glimpse of Arrow’s strategy and technical roadmap. This year’s theme celebrated the spirit of innovation by acknowledging the expertise of Arrow’s…
COTS: A “reactive” good idea (continued)
June 11, 2013
To answer the question, we need to look at the issues of innovation from a different angle; namely economics and markets. Free markets are a wonderful concept as long as the motivation and incentives are aligned in the right way for all the players in order to achieve the set objective. So let us look…
COTS: A “reactive” good idea
May 29, 2013
Following a directive from the US military in the early 1990s, the defense industry made a shift from using custom embedded electronic components made to military specifications to commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components. Since the overall share of the DoD as a consumer was expected to shrink over time, this move to reduce costs took a practical…
Refurbished Boards: What works today may not be reliable tomorrow
May 15, 2013
Saying that something is “good enough for government work” is often meant as a joke and the reference implies “mediocre work.” The irony is that “government work” is often highly sophisticated; systems are designed and engineered to operate in the most extreme environmental conditions for a very long period of time. I recently had the…
ERAI Executive Conference: Gaining Momentum in the Fight against Counterfeits
April 23, 2013
Managing components at risk of going EOL requires proactive planning. If this vital step is not implemented, critical systems run into increased risk of exposure to counterfeits. Two topics that program managers never want to hear about are counterfeit components, and end-of-life (EOL). While it is possible to come across counterfeit components on active products,…
DMSMS 2012 – Sustaining an Integrated Supply Chain
November 7, 2012
After our evacuation from New Orleans, we wrote about the part that collaboration played in our experiences. While we focused on how the collaboration mostly focused on safely addressing an incoming hurricane; generally when we talk about collaboration here at GDCA, we’re talking about collaboration in the sense of an integrated supply chain poised to…
What do vintage cars and embedded boards have in common?
September 26, 2012
They both get harder to maintain as they get older, and if you don’t plan for obsolescence, they can both fail. It’s common sense. As things get older, they become more expensive to maintain. For example, an antique car was state-of-the art when it first came out. It performed beautifully, and the parts were easy…
Obsolescence and why you can’t always just make more.
August 22, 2012
When I first began my work with GDCA one of the questions I had was “Why is dealing with obsolete components not just about making more parts?” As I have come to learn, unfortunately, obsolescence management is not just as simple as “making more parts.” Imagine you manufacture various components. In the 1960s, the computers…
No one wants to be left with EOL overstock
August 8, 2012
On one of the blogs I read, someone commented: “If you’re concerned about counterfeits in obsolete components… don’t worry about to-be-discontinued components — just design them in, and buy what you need to support the product anyway. Then you won’t have to worry about counterfeits.” On the surface and if you are only worried about…