Eight logic gates in one IC

[Boncuk]

Break-even is at about 25,000 units, where we expect to make about 1,000 to 2,000 per year.

Wow! Do you think you'll still be selling the same device in 25 years? (12 1/2 years at best?)

 

[Diver300]

Wow! Do you think you'll still be selling the same device in 25 years? (12 1/2 years at best?)

No, so that is why we pay the extra per device rather than investing in feeders.

I admit that the feeders can be reloaded for other jobs, but I can't see the feeders lasting 12 years, either from wearing out or becoming obsolete.

 

[Frobozz]

Engineers who design consumer products work hard to drive the material and production cost down. Cutting a few cents here and there can make the difference between a success and failure. They will not use this part to replace a less expensive one. There is no up side.

One possible upside I can think of would be saving some space on the PCB. Granted it wouldn't be much, but if you only need one gate you could go with a smaller chip (Mouser shows the 74AUP1G97 as SOP-6 whereas the 74HC00 is SOP-14) and thus free up room to either throw in more components or arrange things to take up less space thus possibly shrinking the PCB depending on how many of the dual/quad chips you used.

Two other minor points. First, the propagation delay of the quad chip I linked is quite a bit higher than the single-gate chip I linked - 90ns as opposed to 21.4ns. Second, the voltage required to use the single-gate chip is also lower - 0.8 to 3.6V as opposed to 2.0 to 6.0V.

In bulk orders on Mouser of 10,000, the single-gate chip costs $0.115 whereas the quad-gate chip costs $0.109. Hard to say though what deals a company could get. Said company might not even buy from Mouser, opting instead to purchase directly from the manufacturer.

74AUP1G97

74HC00

 

[Diver300]

Engineers who design consumer products work hard to drive the material and production cost down. Cutting a few cents here and there can make the difference between a success and failure. They will not use this part to replace a less expensive one. There is no up side.

The money paid to the manufacturer is only some of the cost of fitting the component. In this case, the cost is quite small and the difference between the 74AUP1G97 and other single-gate ICs is even less, about 1 or 2 cents.

Production costs include getting the right component to manufacture at the right time, and having fewer different components reduces that cost.

Even items that have large production runs end up with extra components for unused functions, or for extra safety factor that may or may not be worth having.

There is also development time savings to be considered. If the engineers can reuse a component for which they know its characteristics and availability, time is saved.

Two examples of extra stuff spring to mind:-

1) High frequency boards are often full of capacitors, have a full ground plane and have lots of through-board connections to make sure the ground is good. Most of those boards will not need every capacitor and every hole but it is usually cheaper to make it like that than to spend time optimising to save a few cents per item.

2) I had a car that had a 4 cylinder engine and one exhaust pipe, but that model was also sold with a V6 and an exhaust either side. Mine had a heat shield on both sides of the engine bay, as they obviously decided it was cheaper to fit the full heat shield on everything than to mix and match.

 

[3v0]

In the case where you are replacing single gate packages with an equal number of these 8-way chips, that makes sense.