Discretes in cheap designs (EDN mag)

[KrisBlueNZ]

Discretes in cheap designs - EDN magazine

Martin Tomasz

"As part of my job at Touchstone Semiconductor, I’ve been doing some teardowns of consumer products recently—and from time to time I’m still finding lots of discretes in the analog portion of those designs. A wireless door chime revealed a single-layer, low-tolerance PCB with a forest of TO-92 transistors, diodes, and resistors. The super-regenerative radio-receiver portion had the usual transistor plus potted coils and caps, but there was a surprising number of discretes as part of the low-frequency analog circuitry, too...."

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blog...97367/Discretes-in-cheap-designs?cid=EDNToday

 

[Harald Kapp]

If you can reliaze the function with a handful of discretes and you have cheap workers, why not? It's surely cheaper for those manufacturers, other wise they wouldn't do it this way. As an aside: How long will the highly integrated circuit be supplied? If a simple transistor is discontinued you will probably very easily find a pin compatible substitute.

 

[BobK]

Or perhaps they just have an old design and no one capable of updating it.

Bob