Let us clone your obsolete part

Sigenics has extensive experience in cloning obsolete mixed-signal or analog parts.   The supplies of original manufacturer’s die in stock at companies like Lansdale or Rochester Electronics are limited.  Have Sigenics design a propritary clone for you with a virtually unlimited supply, and at a price point in line with your purchase volume rather than a price which reflects the available supply.

Semiconductor companies continue to develop new products with enhanced capabilities. Many times, an old analog function is replaced with its digital equivalent. Customers start to design in the newer parts, and the sales volume of older parts drops. The semiconductor company obsoletes the older parts as their profitability drops. Sometimes entire families of chips are obsoleted because the semiconductor company decides to shut down an old fab line.

There are many companies which make succesful products with long life cycles. Military, medical and aerospace products often have long life cycles because the cost of redesign and requalification of a product can be very expensive and time consuming. The requalification process must quantify the reliability and safety of any new products in these applications.

Unfortunately, the product sales volume of these hi-rel applications is often low. and after the mainstream commercial market has moved on to newer chips, these lower volume customers are left with an obsolescence problem.

Faced with a costly redesign and requalification of their proven legacy product, several customers have approached us with the specification of their obsolete chip. Sigenics designed a pin-for-pin replacement, and became the supplier of the part.

Rather than having to requalify their entire product, these customers only needed to requailfy Sigenics as a source of supply for the chip which was obsoleted. This approach is often considerably cheaper than a ground-up redesign and requalification.

An example of one such product is an analog audio mixer chip used in a military communications unit. This chip was manufactured by Hughes in a 1972 process on N-type wafers. Sigenics used an isolation method to allow a clone of this chip to be designed on a modern P-type wafer process, and this product continues to be sold and supported by our customer 40 years after its initial design.