Flea Shortage Leads to the Weirdest Things

The global shortage of chips has not made life easier for the electronics design engineer, as products have been designed based on available parts rather than first choices. This showed up in unexpected ways, especially when [CNX software] investigates products whose multiple-choice bill of materials led to manufacturing errors.

On the face of it, designing a PCB with two sets of footprints to accommodate more than one choice of parts is a smart decision. But as Radxa discovered with its Rock 3A single board computer, this could lead to a production crash as some boards left the production line with a mix-and-match BoM in their USB PD circuit that prevented them from working from voltages greater than 5V. The board has footprints for an Injoinic part and a WCH part, and defective boards appear to have the correct supporting components for the other chip than the one on the board.

We join [CNX] in praising Radxa for being clear, and we like that one of the options to fix this is to send the chip in to fit yourself. We are rather happy that it is not us on whose watch such an error occurred, because from experience we know that these things can happen too easily.

Has the chip shortage led to similar production errors in your life? Let us know in the comments.