>      Its a small company (3 people total) so we have to fill different roles
> at different times.  My boss does the electronic design and layout so it is
> hard (or rather, not my place) to distribute shame for this kind of thing:)
> Its not life or death since we're just prototyping.  The personal
> issue (that you may be able to see) is that I'd rather not tell my boss to
> lay the board out again if at all possible, especially since the part is
> available just with a long lead time.  But, on the other hand, we do need to
> get these prototypes going.

This is exactly the time for him to learn this lesson.  Of course, "shame"
may not be the way to go about it, but if you can't find it (or a pin
compatible drop-in), shame or not, you're up a creek.  And if he carries
on designing things with no eye towards actually being able to produce
them, that creek will be very wide and very deep.

If you're going to make 30,000 of these, you may even need to be
thinking beyond availability to "what's available in China" (or
wherever you're having these 30,000 units assembled).

FWIW, I do some work in a 3-person outfit, doing hardware and firmware,
and I learned that lesson the hard way as well.  I had several "perfect"
components, and then learned to my chagrin that they were unavailable.
I didn't actually get to the point of having PCBs made with the wrong
component footprint, but I did do a layout that I had to change.

Sidebar- does TI make a replacement?  They seem to make a fair
number of clone parts, and sometimes have better availability than
Maxim.

Mike H.

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