[sdiy] DIP LM13700 discontinuation

[Ben Bradley]

I've used several "impossible to solder" chips only because they're
available already soldered to breakout boards from Adafruit and
Sparkfun, AND they're popular enough with experimenters for these
companies to offer them that way inexpensively. They don't have
synth-specific chips, but I haven't seen a great need yet. I'd hope
manufacturers would make such chips available on breakout boards as
samples or at least moderately priced (as opposed to some of the eval
boards which can be rather expensive). I've seen some services that
you send them a chip and they'll solder it to a breakout board, but
that gets to be expensive and time-consuming (you buy the chip, it
gets shipped to you, you shi[ it to the service,they solder to the
board and ship it to you).

Prototyping and making one-offs won't be as easy as they have been,
but it'll still be possible for those with enough determination.

On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 4:20 PM Roman Sowa <modular at go2.pl> wrote:
>
> I remember the time I first saw SOIC package, it was uA741 that
> accidently became available in local electronics store. It looked so
> cute! But it was the only chip in SMD out there. Normally I would cut
> the leads of DIP parts and solder them as SMT, but this little fellow
> was amazingly small.
> Today, about 30 years later, the oposite happens - it's much more
> difficult to find needed part in DIP rather than 10 versions of SMD.
>
> Think about people being born today, what will they do in their 20's?
> Will there be any synth diy movement at all? Hard to say, but if there
> will be, those people will probably not even know what a DIP is, and
> SOIC will be considered as "huge and bulky".
>
> Roman
>
> W dniu 2021-05-20 o 20:15, mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca pisze:
> > On Thu, 20 May 2021, Mike Beauchamp wrote:
> >> Can anyone comment on what cancelling the DIP package might mean to the SMT
> >> version in the near future? I wonder if they are no longer producing the
> >> actual die, or just not bothering to put it in a DIP package?
> > Everything ends eventually.  Small analog functions like OTAs in general
> > may be on borrowed time.  Also, there's been talk in this thread of how
> > SOICs are no harder to hand-solder than DIPs; even if we agree on that,
> > SOICs will not remain available forever either.  To a first approximation,
> > nobody builds electronics by hand anymore.  Those of us right here who
> > actually do, are way below the noise floor of an outfit like Texas
> > Instruments.  And the consequence is that some day the only chips
> > available will be chips that only robots can work with.
> >
> > But the product change notice for this says it's because they're
> > discontinuing the "die attach" used by the LM13700N at a particular
> > factory - and lists a few other DIP products that don't seem to be closely
> > related except that they also use that particular process at that factory.
> > So I don't think it's an issue of TI wanting to stop making the LM13700
> > silicon more generally, nor even all DIPs in general - it's just one
> > production process at one factory that they want to shut down.  The DIP
> > LM13700N just happens to be a product affected by that decision.  I don't
> > think it brings the death of the SOIC version any closer; it might even
> > extend the lifetime of the SOIC version if a lot of people who were buying
> > the DIP version end up switching to the SOIC version and boosting that
> > product's sales.
> >
>
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