So that means the Propeller Mini is safe for a while?
Of course. No need to make any assumptions about products being discontinued if they use a QFN. Like Andrew, we also have success internally with QFNs.
The purpose of this thread was to provide some preferential treatment to forum members who buy P8X32A-Q44 chips, which I've done.
This product is replaced with the Propeller Project Board, 32810. The Propeller Project Board is in manufacturing right now.
Prior to this consolidation we had too many variants of the same board, with volume spread across them. In that kind of situation the unit cost (and your price) increases. For this reason we took a careful look at the features and optimized the products into one new part, the Propeller Project Board. I hope to see them in the next 30 days.
This product is replaced with the Propeller Project Board, 32810. The Propeller Project Board is in manufacturing right now.
Prior to this consolidation we had too many variants of the same board, with volume spread across them. In that kind of situation the unit cost (and your price) increases. For this reason we took a careful look at the features and optimized the products into one new part, the Propeller Project Board. I hope to see them in the next 30 days.
Ken Gracey
Thanks Ken. I wondered if that might be the situation. I've got a couple of the older boards (both USB and prop plug versions) so I'll wait for the new version.
- Ron
Ken, so will the shortage be alleviated in a 4 to 8 week time frame?
I'll add to Andrew's comments about the QFN: cleaning. In production with a water-based flux it is much more difficult to clean the interstices under the chip, and as a result the the leakage between the pins can be rather bad. It is not so bad as to affect digital operations, but it can be a problem with analog such as sigma delta or rctime, and it is not good practice to leave a board with conductive flux between the pads, asking for later trouble, especially in high humidity environments. Andrew could say more, but the cleaning process requires pressure and special detergents and drying agents. Much more demanding than the QFP.
And I was just to about to up my soldering skills from SMD resistors and LEDs to SMD chips. Not to mention that from my local distributor ELFA, the QFN is 40% cheaper than the DIP.
Now, I thought there was an assurance from Parallax that Propellers would be available well into the future. Does this not also include the packaging?
I did guess that the magic 480 number was derived from some tray sizes. It's just that I don't recall price break quantities ever being such non round decimal numbers.
Edit: More realistically my soldering skills will max out at QFP.
Posts like this one could lead to rumors getting started. ELFA sells the QFN at 40% less because it is likely considered excess inventory (slow mover). In other words, they likely bought a lot of QFNs, sat on them while customers favored QFPs, and now would like to move the QFNs before they have to be baked and repackaged in new antistat packaging to retain their MSL3 rating. The same holds true at Parallax.
YES, I assure you Propellers will be available well into the future. After all, our company, our future, and our customers depend on them.
If you don't believe me for some reason, just take a look at some of the products we still build. The BS1-IC was released in 1992 and customers still buy them.
I do believe you. Sorry, I did not mean to start any negative rumours.
I can quite understand a distributor wanting to shift stock that is not moving by dropping the price. Better to get some money in than throw them away.
Whilst we are here what is this about "new antistat packaging to retain their MSL3 rating."? I have not heard of that yet.
I do believe you. Sorry, I did not mean to start any negative rumours.
I can quite understand a distributor wanting to shift stock that is not moving by dropping the price. Better to get some money in than throw them away.
Whilst we are here what is this about "new antistat packaging to retain their MSL3 rating."? I have not heard of that yet.
That's okay - I'm feeling a bit "punchy" today with a tad of irritability.
Moisture Sensitivity Level (MSL) ratings are an industry standard guideline published by http://www.jedec.org that all suppliers and distributors follow. The MSL 3 level allows chips to be opened for 168 hours before they need to be baked and resealed again. Our Propeller chips (QFPs) come in big waffle packs - I'm not sure how many chips are in one - maybe a few thousand. Once opened, we reseal and ship to our customers with desiccant to keep their exposure to moisture and atmosphere very low. This problem is more significant in humid environments (California is very dry) like Taiwan and China.
Sorry to bother you with silly questions. Thanks for you description of MSL 3. But that leads to:
1) What on Earth is a " waffle pack"?
2) I thought QFP, QFN and other such surface mount devices were shipped on tapes or trays that are sealed against humidity anyway.
Do you use Google?
A waffle pack is a plastic tray that holds chips, like this one:
These trays are stacked up a few inches with an empty one on top. When they're tightly banded together you can shake the whole system and the chips stay put in their tidy little tray pockets. You must be very careful handling these trays - if you are carrying them around and something comes loose you'll have a real mess on your hands not to mention dust, orientation of the chips, etc. as you try to put them back into the trays. An SMT pick-n-place machine can retrieve chips from a waffle pack or tape and reel packaging.
And yes, we ship production volumes (not samples) fully sealed to protect against humidity. However, let's say you're the guy running shipping at . . Elfa. You've opened a big QFN waffle tray system of a few thousand chips. The first customer wants 30, second customer wants 582, and the third customer wants 18 chips. These three orders come in the same day so you decide not to reseal the remaining trays. You're now 8 hours into your 168 hour allotment if you reseal them quickly. I doubt that many distributors keep detailed records of this nature for each product. At some point, the QFNs could have been exposed for more than 168 hours so they need to be baked and resealed to comply with the MSL3 rating. Something like that, I think. I'm sure Elfa follows good practices in this regard and if they wanted to return their chips back to Parallax we'd take them.
Oh yeah, a thousand times a day. Can't live with out it any more. Ever since I wanted to know what a "plesiochronous digital hierarchy" was back in 1998.
Sorry, I was a bit googled out just then.
But hey, your explanation of the issues with distributors and waffle packs is far better than I just found in the first page of google hits for " waffle pack". Makes a lot of sense.
I know we have discussed this before but whilst we mention ELFA is there any way you can kick their butts.
You will not find the Propeller in ELFA's micro-controller selection system.
If you enter "Parallax Propeller" into ELFA's search box it will not come up with actual Propeller chips. Rather it comes up with all kind of dev boards and such.
I only found out that ELFA had Propellers by idly flicking through the pages of their hard copy catalogue years ago.
How the heck do they ever sell any Propeller chips?
I know we have discussed this before but whist we mention ELFA is there any way you can kick their butts.
You will not find the Propeller in ELFA's micro-controller selection system.
If you enter "Parallax Propeller" into ELFA's search box it will not come up with actual Propeller chips. Rather it comes up with all kind of dev boards and such.
I only found out that ELFA had Propellers by idly flicking through the pages of their hard copy catalogue years ago.
How the hell do they ever sell any Propeller chips?
Yes, today will be that day. This frustrates me more than you.
I'm writing our representative a message right now to fix this problem.
I know we have discussed this before but whilst we mention ELFA is there any way you can kick their butts.
You will not find the Propeller in ELFA's micro-controller selection system.
If you enter "Parallax Propeller" into ELFA's search box it will not come up with actual Propeller chips. Rather it comes up with all kind of dev boards and such.
I only found out that ELFA had Propellers by idly flicking through the pages of their hard copy catalogue years ago.
How the hell do they ever sell any Propeller chips?
Heater, if you didn't know what a Propeller is but you wanted to stumble upon it, wouldn't you enter "microcontroller" in the search box, and then choose "embedded" as the next option? If you do this, Parallax appears in the same list as other big companies. I think we're represented through the main kind of search a visitor to Elfa would use. See below for my screen shot which shows all chips and boards:
Now, if you enter "Parallax" in the search box, many Propeller-related items appear but not the actual chips. I'll see that this is fixed. They're asleep now and I'll be asleep when they're awake, so it might be a while before I can get an update back to this thread.
To be a bit fair to ELFA I have to say that they did have some Parallax boxes, no idea what they were now, behind the sales desk when I used to visit their store in Helsinki.
Sadly that store has closed or moved a year or two back.
Seems now their store in Finland is in the far north.
Let's say I'm searching for a likely MCU for my next world changing project.
I know about elfa.se so I go there. (elfa.com is something else and elfa.fi does not seem to exist)
I hit "Active components" in the menu on the left hand side.
I hit the "Digital Circuits / Development Tools / Quartz" sub menu.
I hit the "microcontrollers" sub menu.
There I see no Parallax, only PIC, AVR, ARM and so on. Not even under "Miscellaneous Microcontrollers"!
If I actually do as you suggest and search for "microcontroller" I can indeed filter by manufacturer, and if I know of Parallax find the Propeller. That presumes of course that I know what I'm looking for.
Think the new Juki P&P line helps a bit, too? ......Our customers work with a variety of contract manufacturers all around the country and in Asia. ......Collectively, our customer feedback around QFNs shows a much lower yield. Not to mention the packaging cost is at least a $.75 more than a QFP. As for redesigning your module to switch to QFP, don't bother. We have plenty in stock for several years.
Ken, yes, the ~3 year old lines definitely help out the quality and I would suspect that many smaller CMs see a difference in yields based upon how much efforts they can or are willing to put towards fine tuning a process. Don't worry about my module redesign, at my rates, it would take ~200 years to deplete your stock. Version 2 of the M44D40+ will still have the QFN (as well as uSD and linear power regulator)
What I'm wondering now is how many thousands of a thing do you have to make in a run before you have all those parameters tweaked just nicely to get that 0.00% difference in yield between QFNs and QFPs. I'm kind of guessing that for small runs those optimizations are never quite made and yield drops.
Fortunately, practice makes perfect, so the more QFNs and various board designs we deal with, the easier it is to dial in a process before you even build a board. What we have learned from the 1000 piece runs, we can apply to prototypes, etc, so that we start off with a fairly high level of confidence. For example, if a standard 44 pin QFN works best with a certain size optimized aperture on the stencil, then any other boards with a 44 pin QFN will get that aperture definition for the first build. There are numerous variables involved (alloy type, surface finish, copper weight/thermal mass during reflow, fab thickness, size of the board, etc, etc), but you can usually address 80% of them just by looking at some gerber data or a sample board utilizing your past results.
I'll add to Andrew's comments about the QFN: cleaning. In production with a water-based flux it is much more difficult to clean the interstices under the chip, and as a result the the leakage between the pins can be rather bad. It is not so bad as to affect digital operations, but it can be a problem with analog such as sigma delta or rctime, and it is not good practice to leave a board with conductive flux between the pads, asking for later trouble, especially in high humidity environments. Andrew could say more, but the cleaning process requires pressure and special detergents and drying agents. Much more demanding than the QFP.
Yes, cleaning is a major issue for QFNs and as such, we normally never use an aqueous flux on any BTCs (bottom terminated component). We use no-clean pastes that utilize a flux that is non-corrosive even in its non-activated state. If you don't, you have to start discussing dendrites which is the equivalent of talking about root canals.
... In fact, every chip on my design is QFN and only two of them have occasional problems: the LSM303DLHC and the MAX8819A, both of which have finer pitch then the Prop.
Collectively, our customer feedback around QFNs shows a much lower yield. Not to mention the packaging cost is at least a $.75 more than a QFP.
This may be the issue, the Prop QFN is a rare package, with a larger than usual QFN pin pitch.
When Contract Manufacturers say QFN, they usually mean 0.5mm or 0.4mm pitch devices.
As reported above, those DO have lower yields.
On the topic of packages and assembly, I have seen an interesting reverse-trend out of Asia
A number now offer larger pin count (64p 80p) TQFP ALSO in 0.8mm pitch, I think that is the Wave-Soldering limit.
That can mean two 64 pin part codes.
I see the same issue with ELFA and Propellers as Heater. Right now I'm testing their Android application. It's impossible to find Propellers under any of the sensible selections. Completely impossible. But you will find them if you search for Propeller. It's just that even the search will not tell where in their hierarchy they are. You will have to search every time, if you don't know about Propellers I don't see where they could be found with the ELFA Android app. You will not find anything by browsing.
I just checked your website and it shows that you're not expecting inventory until mid-december 2014. I hope that's not true!
That's a manually-entered date representing the longest possible lead time. As I mentioned above in the very first post, this may be the foundry's new lead time to Parallax. If they moved it from 12 weeks to 24 weeks there could be little I can do to change it. You're all going to need to give me a week to get a really accurate handle on this lead time. I'll need to look at the wafer lead time, packaging lead time, testing lead time, and dial in the tightest dates we can to produce an accurate estimate.
Allow me a week to get this research done, avoiding speculation here on the forums in the meantime.
Bah, now I find a little problem with DigiKey and Propellers. If you go to their MCU selection page and check "core size = 32 bits 8 core" they will only present XMOS processors.
And guess what?
NONE of those XMOS devices are actually 8 core! They have 8 hardware scheduled threads in a core which XMOS calls "logical cores". A piece of marketing deception by XMOS. Hateful.
Allow me a week to get this research done, avoiding speculation here on the forums in the meantime.
Ken, your over abundance of honesty with the situation should at least grant you 2 weeks to get accurate dates. I have dealt with other manufacturers/suppliers that will give you a lead time or stock date and no other information at all, so basically you just have to deal with it. So, thanks for the excellent customer service..... as usual!
Ken, your over abundance of honesty with the situation should at least grant you 2 weeks to get accurate dates. I have dealt with other manufacturers/suppliers that will give you a lead time or stock date and no other information at all, so basically you just have to deal with it. So, thanks for the excellent customer service..... as usual!
Comments
Of course. No need to make any assumptions about products being discontinued if they use a QFN. Like Andrew, we also have success internally with QFNs.
The purpose of this thread was to provide some preferential treatment to forum members who buy P8X32A-Q44 chips, which I've done.
Ken Gracey
"Tested in USA"
This product is replaced with the Propeller Project Board, 32810. The Propeller Project Board is in manufacturing right now.
Prior to this consolidation we had too many variants of the same board, with volume spread across them. In that kind of situation the unit cost (and your price) increases. For this reason we took a careful look at the features and optimized the products into one new part, the Propeller Project Board. I hope to see them in the next 30 days.
Ken Gracey
Thanks Ken. I wondered if that might be the situation. I've got a couple of the older boards (both USB and prop plug versions) so I'll wait for the new version.
- Ron
I'll add to Andrew's comments about the QFN: cleaning. In production with a water-based flux it is much more difficult to clean the interstices under the chip, and as a result the the leakage between the pins can be rather bad. It is not so bad as to affect digital operations, but it can be a problem with analog such as sigma delta or rctime, and it is not good practice to leave a board with conductive flux between the pads, asking for later trouble, especially in high humidity environments. Andrew could say more, but the cleaning process requires pressure and special detergents and drying agents. Much more demanding than the QFP.
Posts like this one could lead to rumors getting started. ELFA sells the QFN at 40% less because it is likely considered excess inventory (slow mover). In other words, they likely bought a lot of QFNs, sat on them while customers favored QFPs, and now would like to move the QFNs before they have to be baked and repackaged in new antistat packaging to retain their MSL3 rating. The same holds true at Parallax.
YES, I assure you Propellers will be available well into the future. After all, our company, our future, and our customers depend on them.
If you don't believe me for some reason, just take a look at some of the products we still build. The BS1-IC was released in 1992 and customers still buy them.
Ken Gracey
Yes, perhaps even sooner.
Ken Gracey
I do believe you. Sorry, I did not mean to start any negative rumours.
I can quite understand a distributor wanting to shift stock that is not moving by dropping the price. Better to get some money in than throw them away.
Whilst we are here what is this about "new antistat packaging to retain their MSL3 rating."? I have not heard of that yet.
That's okay - I'm feeling a bit "punchy" today with a tad of irritability.
Moisture Sensitivity Level (MSL) ratings are an industry standard guideline published by http://www.jedec.org that all suppliers and distributors follow. The MSL 3 level allows chips to be opened for 168 hours before they need to be baked and resealed again. Our Propeller chips (QFPs) come in big waffle packs - I'm not sure how many chips are in one - maybe a few thousand. Once opened, we reseal and ship to our customers with desiccant to keep their exposure to moisture and atmosphere very low. This problem is more significant in humid environments (California is very dry) like Taiwan and China.
Ken Gracey
Sorry to bother you with silly questions. Thanks for you description of MSL 3. But that leads to:
1) What on Earth is a " waffle pack"?
2) I thought QFP, QFN and other such surface mount devices were shipped on tapes or trays that are sealed against humidity anyway.
Do you use Google?
A waffle pack is a plastic tray that holds chips, like this one:
These trays are stacked up a few inches with an empty one on top. When they're tightly banded together you can shake the whole system and the chips stay put in their tidy little tray pockets. You must be very careful handling these trays - if you are carrying them around and something comes loose you'll have a real mess on your hands not to mention dust, orientation of the chips, etc. as you try to put them back into the trays. An SMT pick-n-place machine can retrieve chips from a waffle pack or tape and reel packaging.
And yes, we ship production volumes (not samples) fully sealed to protect against humidity. However, let's say you're the guy running shipping at . . Elfa. You've opened a big QFN waffle tray system of a few thousand chips. The first customer wants 30, second customer wants 582, and the third customer wants 18 chips. These three orders come in the same day so you decide not to reseal the remaining trays. You're now 8 hours into your 168 hour allotment if you reseal them quickly. I doubt that many distributors keep detailed records of this nature for each product. At some point, the QFNs could have been exposed for more than 168 hours so they need to be baked and resealed to comply with the MSL3 rating. Something like that, I think. I'm sure Elfa follows good practices in this regard and if they wanted to return their chips back to Parallax we'd take them.
Ken Gracey
Sorry, I was a bit googled out just then.
But hey, your explanation of the issues with distributors and waffle packs is far better than I just found in the first page of google hits for " waffle pack". Makes a lot of sense.
Thank you.
I know we have discussed this before but whilst we mention ELFA is there any way you can kick their butts.
You will not find the Propeller in ELFA's micro-controller selection system.
If you enter "Parallax Propeller" into ELFA's search box it will not come up with actual Propeller chips. Rather it comes up with all kind of dev boards and such.
I only found out that ELFA had Propellers by idly flicking through the pages of their hard copy catalogue years ago.
How the heck do they ever sell any Propeller chips?
Yes, today will be that day. This frustrates me more than you.
I'm writing our representative a message right now to fix this problem.
Will report back with corrective action.
Ken Gracey
Heater, if you didn't know what a Propeller is but you wanted to stumble upon it, wouldn't you enter "microcontroller" in the search box, and then choose "embedded" as the next option? If you do this, Parallax appears in the same list as other big companies. I think we're represented through the main kind of search a visitor to Elfa would use. See below for my screen shot which shows all chips and boards:
Now, if you enter "Parallax" in the search box, many Propeller-related items appear but not the actual chips. I'll see that this is fixed. They're asleep now and I'll be asleep when they're awake, so it might be a while before I can get an update back to this thread.
Ken Gracey
Sadly that store has closed or moved a year or two back.
Seems now their store in Finland is in the far north.
Let's say I'm searching for a likely MCU for my next world changing project.
I know about elfa.se so I go there. (elfa.com is something else and elfa.fi does not seem to exist)
I hit "Active components" in the menu on the left hand side.
I hit the "Digital Circuits / Development Tools / Quartz" sub menu.
I hit the "microcontrollers" sub menu.
There I see no Parallax, only PIC, AVR, ARM and so on. Not even under "Miscellaneous Microcontrollers"!
If I actually do as you suggest and search for "microcontroller" I can indeed filter by manufacturer, and if I know of Parallax find the Propeller. That presumes of course that I know what I'm looking for.
Ken, yes, the ~3 year old lines definitely help out the quality and I would suspect that many smaller CMs see a difference in yields based upon how much efforts they can or are willing to put towards fine tuning a process. Don't worry about my module redesign, at my rates, it would take ~200 years to deplete your stock. Version 2 of the M44D40+ will still have the QFN (as well as uSD and linear power regulator)
Fortunately, practice makes perfect, so the more QFNs and various board designs we deal with, the easier it is to dial in a process before you even build a board. What we have learned from the 1000 piece runs, we can apply to prototypes, etc, so that we start off with a fairly high level of confidence. For example, if a standard 44 pin QFN works best with a certain size optimized aperture on the stencil, then any other boards with a 44 pin QFN will get that aperture definition for the first build. There are numerous variables involved (alloy type, surface finish, copper weight/thermal mass during reflow, fab thickness, size of the board, etc, etc), but you can usually address 80% of them just by looking at some gerber data or a sample board utilizing your past results.
Yes, cleaning is a major issue for QFNs and as such, we normally never use an aqueous flux on any BTCs (bottom terminated component). We use no-clean pastes that utilize a flux that is non-corrosive even in its non-activated state. If you don't, you have to start discussing dendrites which is the equivalent of talking about root canals.
This may be the issue, the Prop QFN is a rare package, with a larger than usual QFN pin pitch.
When Contract Manufacturers say QFN, they usually mean 0.5mm or 0.4mm pitch devices.
As reported above, those DO have lower yields.
On the topic of packages and assembly, I have seen an interesting reverse-trend out of Asia
A number now offer larger pin count (64p 80p) TQFP ALSO in 0.8mm pitch, I think that is the Wave-Soldering limit.
That can mean two 64 pin part codes.
I just checked your website and it shows that you're not expecting inventory until mid-december 2014. I hope that's not true!
As you know, I use dip props in a lot of my products. I was not concerned when I read the quoted post.
I am *VERY* concerned when I see "Available after 12/12/2014" on the product plage.
Please clarify - which is it? A few weeks? Or three months?
-Tor
That's a manually-entered date representing the longest possible lead time. As I mentioned above in the very first post, this may be the foundry's new lead time to Parallax. If they moved it from 12 weeks to 24 weeks there could be little I can do to change it. You're all going to need to give me a week to get a really accurate handle on this lead time. I'll need to look at the wafer lead time, packaging lead time, testing lead time, and dial in the tightest dates we can to produce an accurate estimate.
Allow me a week to get this research done, avoiding speculation here on the forums in the meantime.
Ken Gracey
Electronics & Automation > Embedded / Wireless / Education > Kits / Prototyping & Development Boards > Breadboards / Kits > Propeller Microcontrollers
Where as all their other micro-controllers, PIC, AVR, ARM, etc are under:
Electronics & Automation > Active Components > Digital Circuits / Development Tools / Quartz > Microcontrollers
Contrast to DigiKey where a search fro "microcontrollers" gets you to their MCU selection page which lists all manufacturers including Parallax.
And guess what?
NONE of those XMOS devices are actually 8 core! They have 8 hardware scheduled threads in a core which XMOS calls "logical cores". A piece of marketing deception by XMOS. Hateful.
Ken, your over abundance of honesty with the situation should at least grant you 2 weeks to get accurate dates. I have dealt with other manufacturers/suppliers that will give you a lead time or stock date and no other information at all, so basically you just have to deal with it. So, thanks for the excellent customer service..... as usual!
Would this mean the final nail for the Propstick USB also?