re: X32 Discussion
Interesting to see problems like this play out in public. I suspect Uli has a mature engineering change process in place, while his personal attention will no doubt speed these changes along. Since he is limited by constraints like time being unidirectional (only moves forward), there are containers on the water and products in customers hands with differing degrees of possible noise issues.
This appears to be a relatively simple problem to fix, since it doesn't involve shutting down the entire supply chain to incorporate changes to lower level components or sub assemblies. The final fix may involve design changes to make it harder for the factory to assemble it wrong, but those can be phased in.
Global companies can often identify problems quickly, correction is the "biotch" and can drag out months and longer, not because of bureaucracy, but because of simple logistics. Suppose instead of simply moving a wire away from the noise source he had to change to a different connector on both ends of that noisy cable to say accommodate shielding and a connection for that. That would mean engineering changes that would have to be incorporated into both raw PCBs before they get fabricated, and sourcing production quantity of the new connectors and cable before board level assembly. When problems reach deeper into the supply chain to involve unique components. the time line to correct can get even longer. Then what do you do about all the production in flow? This can become pretty painful, expensive, and disruptive when an engineering change involves a high volume product with strong sales. As it is, products with this potential flaw will keep showing up in the distribution channel for some time longer unless there is some 100% barrier inspection of suspect shipments at delivery (see what I mean about expensive). With all the buzz, and pre-sales this product has garnered, you don't want to remove it from the market for even a couple months.
They dodged a bullet, if this can be fixed by simply adjusting the lead dress, while one can question if one or more balls were dropped along the way. Was this missed at final QA, or did the lead dress change between final QA and delivery? Was this mechanism unknown to designers (I kind of doubt that).
I wouldn't read too much, either pro or con into this. This is still early days and we need to see more gigs under the belt to get a true read on long term robustness of these units. With complex new product roll-outs "stuff" always happens. If this is the worst of it, they did pretty good.
JR
