Wittily entitled JurASIC parts, a programme started by analogue design specialists JVD of San Jose brings obsolete and NLA analogue ICs back into production for older commercial and military applications.
Semiconductor companies, especially those that have been in business for a few dozen years or more, have had to periodically "prune" their product offerings in order to better manage their business.
The overhead of maintaining a low or near zero volume product is quite high, and although most companies have the foresight to offer their then existing customers lifetime buys, there have been many examples where additional need has arisen for critical MRO quantities. This has been particularly evident in military and aerospace applications.
Different than its typical analogue ASIC business, the 29 year-old analogue semiconductor company JVD has been called upon to assist customers who need small to medium quantities of obsolete ("extinct") semiconductors. In some instances, process information and masks sets can be obtained from the original manufacture and the needed chips can be resurrected with minimal effort. Other times, the old tooling materials no longer exist in corporate archives and the needed parts must be re-engineered from scratch, similar to a new ASIC design.
Copying and cloning an out of production IC can be very difficult, particularly with chips containing analogue. The "genetically engineered" reproduction is likely to find itself inserted into a pre-existing PCB with surrounding circuitry designed to compliment the unique characteristics of the original chip design, layout and process. Subtle differences from the original design can cause unwanted parasitic oscillations, noise or worse in an existing board.
JVD engineers are careful to analyze the behaviour of the original designs and incorporate even the small abnormalities they may contain into the new version. Some of the devices that have been resurrected include full military spec versions of the AD584 Programmable Precision Vref, NE5534 Low Noise, High Speed Op Amp, OP-07 Ultra Low Noise Op Amp, OP-97 Low Power, High Precision Op Amp, as well as many others.
