"Roy Smith" wrote in message
...
In article .com,
wrote:

You better hope that Garmin does a lifetime buy on critical end-of-
life components to be able to support it for decades to come. All big
avionics companies do this as a matter of course since their product
life-cycles tend to outlast commercial electronics by many
generations. Processors and memory ICs tend to be the parts that have
the shortest life-cycles and need to be stockpiled.

Not just stockpiled, but jealously hoarded and rationed.

A bunch of years ago I was doing a repair job on a piece of lab equipment
which had an embedded process control computer made by HP. One of the
eproms had been damaged. I tried to order a new eprom from HP but was
told
they were no longer available. It took a while, but when I finally got to
the right person and explained to them that I had a piece of dead gear and
needed this part to fix it, the answer suddenly became, "Oh, of course
we've still got a few stashed away and can sell you one".

Depending on the IC it can read, identified and/or programmed. I can read
and dump over 11,400 diffrent devices. I can even bypass security locks on
some microcontrollers, pals & gals. I miss the days or repackaging dies
becuse it was a once off unit and some monkey burnt /broke off the solder
lugs hahahaha them were the days. Or the days of People thinking they can
hide the identy of an IC by grinding off the numbers just lock it in the
programer hit auto find done 90% of the time it found it.

Most the time parts are good it's workmanship and assembly thats the issue.