Originally posted by Mr R J Ling:
At least the designer has the luxury of testing during R&D to make sure their choices do not adversely affect reliability or cause harm and it's their job, I suppose, when all's said and done.
Not sure if there's any difference in the selection of new components to cover obsolescence in medical equipment to other other electronic equipment, but in my previous employment this would be too small a task for a designer and would often get done by either junior hardware engineer or technician.
Mainly a paper work exercise, calculate heat produced, max current flowing in critical failure, half a dozen other parameters and then pop it in see if it works, then half a dozen various tests including temperature and emc checks to see if the new component mucks anything up.
On the internet there use to be websites where you could enter the characteristics of your existing component and it would return equivalents with similar and higher ratings, but its been a long time since I've had to use one.
Chris
