Having multiple BOMs for a given PCB now seems commonplace due to market availability conditions. Making sure everyone on the production and test teams understand how to handle this may have a learning curve.
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Interesting – this is probably a scenario that many current processes don’t handle very well.
Do you see any signs that the chip shortage may be letting up? I’ve wondered with the economy cooling off if that well “help” the chip shortage problem …
I think mostly that the existing processes do handle this type of thing well, but in the past the processes could be shortcutted and everything was fine. Now, when a single board may have a variety of different population options depending on BOM availability, no one can take any shortcuts any longer.
What really intregues me about this is things like EMI compliance testing. It’s my understanding that you’d need to test every combination of parts used within a product, especially for intentional emitters. I’m pretty confident this is going to be shortcutted by many vendors.
I don’t see any signs that the chip shortage is going to let up. I have seen a TON of product lines get end-of-lifed recently, often with extremely little warning, which drives even more churn, so even if the shortages are resolved there’s plenty of EOL maintenance work to be done in the next year or two for PCB designs.
@cbrake has started a project Git PLM · GitHub perhaps can make it easier to manage BOMs