Joel said:
I'm sure it has something to do with the desire from many companies'
management to be able to hire relatively unskilled engineers (...they're
cheap!) and still have a product.
Arguably that's not a particularly awful incentive, but few companies seem to
realize that the whole approach fails as soon as you want to do something just
a little bit different than what the whiz-bang "all-in-one" IC does.
That's when people give Joerg a call.
Sometimes they give me a call a bit late, after the purchasing guy
became unable to source some super-duper panacea chip. Then it's often
"tabula rasa", scrap the whole design and start from scratch.
Or the company I work at, for that matter. We spend plenty of time these days
building radios from all the discrete mixers/amps/etc. that are now readily
available, although unfortuntaely it's often difficult to compete on power
relative to what some of those old Philips (NXP) parts provided. (Remeber the
UAA2080? Beautiful part... very low power, good quality filters using
gyrators...)
Personally I am not a fan of such "panacea chips". The millisecond they
lose a key account the manufacturers might stop production and soon
after purge the datasheet.
At least battery technology has progressed a bit.
However, electronics and especially the SW guys keep bloating stuff
faster than battery technology can keep up with. Case in point: My early
90's laptop ran up to six hours on one NiCd charge and so I opted not to
buy the extra capacity battery. Nowadays it's down to two hours with an
expensive LiIon battery that has many times the capacity. And I do the
same type of work on them
The concept of a mobile device needing a cooling fan is IMHO just plain
sick.
Or take our Dimango remote doorbell. 20 bucks, 10 (!) years on the first
set of batteries and no slowdown in sight. Of course, the receiver is
completely discrete. This year I am going to change the batteries anyhow
because they might leak just from old age.