Obsolescence

Robbing from Your Future to Service Your Past

March 10, 2018

A Holistic Approach to Obsolescence with GDCA by Amelia Dalton The design cycle drum beats on. Your research and development team have been stressed for months. The constant push for “the next big thing” keeps you up at night. We’ve all been there. In this episode of Fish Fry, we look at how the ever-growing…

Embedded World 2017

March 27, 2017

Embedded World 2017 was a blast! After 2 weeks on the road of sub-zero temperatures in DC, Boston, Ottawa, and Montreal it was great to see spring for the first time in 2017 in Nürnberg (Nuremberg! German beer is best consumed in the sunshine!) At the fair, all the OEMs I spoke with were jam packed with…

Innovating Obsolescence: When the Supply Chain Is Around Your Throat

February 26, 2015

Obsolescence can pose a grave threat to individuals, economies, and nations. Security and defense receive a great deal of attention in our Critical Thoughts section, partly because they are domains in which obsolescence is highly visible and easily conceived. In fact, the defense industry has its own acronym, that specifically outlines the necessary steps to…

Sensors Going Blind: Obsolete Medical Scanners in the Developing World

August 20, 2014

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night with chest pains. You can’t call 911 because you live in a region without telephone service. There are few emergency services available and, even so, there are few functional roads. The pains pass, but you know you need to have it looked at. You begin the…

Microgrid Death Spiral: The Argument Over “Obsolete” Power Infrastructure

May 7, 2014

In January of 2013, the Edison Electric Institute released a report titled “Disruptive Challenges: Financial Implications and Strategic Responses to a Changing Retail Electric Business”, which outlined a variety of challenges traditional power utilities will face in the upcoming years. The current power infrastructure in the United States wasn’t constructed with end-user power generation in…

A Tale of Two SHIELDS: Marvel Comics, DARPA, and Counterfeiting

April 9, 2014

Marvel Comic’s SHIELD (Strategic help Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division) and, slick as it is, it is more likely to wind up counterfeited than prevent counterfeiting It is a program devised by a secretive government agency. Its purpose is to organize and motivate the top actors in their fields to come together to prevent…

Drinking From a Too-Short Straw: The Brutal Costs of Mismanaging Obsolescence

March 12, 2014

It can be easy for those of us in the embedded industry to think of obsolescence as predominantly an electronics or software issue and to imagine its scope as limited to small- or medium-scale consequences. Unfortunately, the harsh reality is that obsolescence is a problem across many industries, and the consequences can be severe. The…

Keys to Managing DMSMS: A Clear Assessment of Obsolescence Risk

November 13, 2013

“Proactively consider DMSMS through[out] a system’s life cycle by anticipating potential DMSMS occurrences and taking appropriate logistics, acquisition, and budgeting steps to prevent DMSMS from adversely affecting readiness or total ownership cost.” SD-22 DMSMS Guidebook Continued from a previous post: Being Proactive While obsolescence management traditionally starts after products become mature, that is really waiting…

Software Obsolescence: Why Modernization Doesn’t Necessarily Mean “Modern”

September 18, 2013

For players in the embedded industry it is easy to forget how large the problem of obsolescence can be, especially beyond the component level. Recently, I was talking to a software engineer who had spent a year doing software modernization, as a result of upgrading a flight navigational system from the original code to Linux.…