THE PROBLEM
Imagine you are confronted with an obsolete or undocumented circuit board from some vital piece of equipment and the situation requires that product function again, or maintains production until a drastic redesign has occurred. But there exists no BOM, no layouts, and no schematics. What if you have been tasked to redesign a portion of a board that contains obsolete components, and you don’t have documentation as a guide? Equipment that is no longer manufactured or supported by the original supplier is an increasingly pressing problem for users and maintainers of long life systems such as water and electricity utilities, medical equipment, military systems, air traffic control, aircraft maintenance, avionics simulation, traffic control, trains, and signaling.
For systems with an operational life of 25 years or more, the support strategy for spares and repairs are critical issues. Famous and long established companies are being taken over, restructured, or go out of business, leading to the growing situation where no support is available. Rapidly changing technology increases support and manufacturing problems. Many commercial products quickly become obsolete (try buying the same PC motherboard after only six months ….) and are not supported or manufactured long before the end of their true operating life. And although many consumer products are replaced rather than repaired, this approach cannot be applied to long-life systems.
A standard solution from many suppliers is an upgrade to the latest product or its nearest equivalent. But when a product is part of a large system that has been through rigorous certification, this solution is unacceptable unless the replacement is physically and functionally identical (form/fit/function). Changing to a new component may mean the enormous expense of requalifying the whole system for critical equipment such as medical diagnostic machines.
Read on here: http://www.saelig.com/supplier/abi/abi-reveng.pdf
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