Parts Obsolescence Challenges for the Electronics Industry

The lifetime of electronic parts has decreased over the years. The result is that companies designing embedded systems with long life-time would have problems. Thus, there are problems with manufacturing the products for as many years as they would like to as well as being able to provide spare parts for customers. To be able to analyze the extent of the problem as well as learning about how the industry copes with the problem, we have conducted a survey among the foremost Norwegian original equipment manufacturer (OEM) companies and contract manufacturers. This paper presents the main observations from this survey. The main conclusion from the survey is that obsolescence is a problem but the extent of it depends on how much proactive focus a company has. The companies taking precautions would benefit from that by extending the time span before they have to redesign their systems.