A mess o trouble1/10/2024 ![]() I believe he’s the only person whose signature is molded into the case of the early Macintosh and the original Amiga computers. Tonight I’ll be attending a presentation from Ron Nicholson, who was both a member of the original Macintosh engineering team (1980-1982) and founder and Director of Engineering of Amiga (1983-1984). Read 4 comments and join the conversation That would be theoretically possible here, but it would be a big task and I’m not sure I have the appetite for it. The only answer is to factor the likely future availability of parts into your designs, and be prepared to redesign the product around new parts when existing parts reach end-of-life. Usually you get more of a grace period, and a part is eventually designated Not For New Designs, and finally you get a “last-time buy” notification to stock up before the chip is gone for good. There’s no guarantee that parts will continue to be available forever. I’m disappointed of course, but that’s life in this industry. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that Lattice will have sorted out its manufacturing problems by then. At the present rate, the current stock should last until sometime in the spring of 2023. The only bright spot (for buyers, not for me) is that sales have been slower than expected, so I expect the existing stock will last longer than my original estimate of August-September. This is all just a long-winded way of saying that the future availability of Yellowstone looks even more doubtful now than it did back in April. They’ll continue to push back the estimated lead times for another year or so, before finally admitting reality and giving the chip End of Life status. After two years of unavailability and a prediction of at least one year more, I wouldn’t be surprised if this chip were never available again. They’re clearly having major difficulty sorting out their manufacturing capacity and meeting all the demand, so an older inexpensive chip that earns little profit for Lattice is probably at the bottom of their priority list. They have no idea when or even if they’ll ever have these chips available again. I strongly suspect that Lattice’s numbers for this chip family are somewhere between wild-ass guesses and complete fiction. The best case is a different Lattice FPGA package variant that currently lists a 53 week lead time, but I no longer trust these numbers at all. But as of today the lead time on that chip has actually increased to 79 weeks! Ugh. It’s been 19 weeks since that April update, so theoretically the 67 week lead time should now be down to 48 weeks. Since then I’ve been watching Lattice’s estimated lead times, hoping that maybe they’d drop to something half-way normal, but unfortunately it’s gotten even worse. I predicted that BMOW would exhaust the existing stock of Yellowstone hardware sometime in August or September, and that would be the end. The Lattice FPGA at the heart of Yellowstone was out of stock everywhere, with an estimated factory lead time on new chips of an incredible 67 weeks. Kay Koba, Kero's Mac Mods Store on Mac ROM-inator I Kitīack in April I wrote about the future of Yellowstone, and due to the global semiconductor shortage, the future was not looking bright.Hubert on Apple SmartPort Pin Directions.STEVE BURKE on Floppy Emu Disk Emulator for Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa.groinksan on Yellowstone Future Forecast Update.Steve on Floppy Emu Disk Emulator for Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa.Yellowstone Universal Disk Controller for Apple II Floppy Emu Disk Emulator for vintage Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa
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