Is there a dip in DIP chips and I'm not talking about tortilla chips? As a hobbyist, I rely on having TTL dual-inline chips available for projects. It's tough to build surface mount designs for the basic bench top hobbyist. Recently I wanted to buy some 74LS283 (4-bit adder) chip to demonstrate how binary number addition uses logic gates to perform addition. The DIP package version was hard to find! I ordered from Digikey and after the order was accepted, they dropped it. None available. TI was no help. Jameco had them. What I got was a strange version of the device. No typical codes on the chip. The logo was something I've never seen before. They worked, but it got me wondering if the supply chain was missing a link.

Generally what I found was there is a growth in market demand but supply is broken from global economics coming apart. Who really needs DIP package ICs? It turns out that there are still a lot of products out there that need DIP replacement parts or... redesign boards to accept more modern ICs package styles (surface mount) or complete circuit redesign to avoid the older chips that made it all possible in the first place.

My suspicion is the DIP packages will go to third parties to make in an "off Broadway" fashion or simply fade away because the cost of adding an old style startup line to the current resurgence of the IC industry in the US will react to cost analysis and conclude that DIP packages are not cost effective. Either way, those chips will probably cost you more to get as a hobbyist if they don't disappear altogether.

So what do hobbyists do? Go back to school and get savvy about surface mount techniques and get into PCB design and layouts. Of course, most of that is dependent on over-seas fabs to build at a reasonable cost at the present time. So how long is that going to last? Poof. Gone.

Well, we will have to get more sophisticated yet and create projects that start at the microcontroller entry point and involve prefab sensor integration and system level thinking. Oh I know, that's what people with at least a four year education do. Or just go into cloud-based programming and forget the solder.