That is an all around terrible idea. Even in the best environments chip replacement is by no means certain and requires significant expertise. This is in no way sustainable or doable and obviously easily abused by manufacturers.
No, you've created many more problems. Your PCB now has to be larger, you need sockets for the ICs, increasing volume, weight, and cost. You also lose the conformal coating which offers moisture protection and you've introduced a new failure mode where chips vibrate out of the socket. Costs further increase as the manufacturer now needs to stock thousands of chips, most of which will never sell. You also introduce more manual steps in the assembly process. Boards can't be machine assembled to the same degree, which drives up costs even more.
You could go with a socket-less design, but then you need expensive equipment and a highly skilled technician to do the replacement. You still lose the conformal coating, as such coated boards are not very repairable in the general case.
For as much as you'd pay for a replacement chip and labor, a new PCB costs ten times less.
Component level repair is never an economical option in this scenario. It only works out if replacement parts are unavailable.
What if a standardized chip could get some kind of standardized pin out so it can slot into a PCB with a harness or something? Maybe not safe enough without a solid solder joint? Though we use plug-in fuses all through cars. Are they only for non-critical systems?
No, I probably don’t, you’re right. I took a look at some of the pin outs for chips in my old car and even those are pretty massive in some cases. I’m not sure how you’d ensure they were seated and secure with such little movement. I suspect these are normally soldered and even epoxied in place.
That is actually the hard part, odds are the chips inside are not longer made. When making ABS controllers the OEM guesses how many replacements will be needed and buys that many extra to put in a environment controlled warehouse - when they guess wrong they run out and if the parts inside are no longer made the rest of us are out of luck. If the chips inside are still made the OEM will generally order more (if they run out before the expected date that implies there is a lot of demand so it is worth ordering more).
The expected date above is for normal care lifespan. If you are a collector good luck.
What do you expect manufacturers to do exactly? They all sell replacement parts, it is good business.
You obviously can't expect them to support models forever. Even right now their suppliers keep open ancient manufacturing lines for the ancient chips used in these controllers.
>If you are a collector good luck.
Good thing that is a small minority of, usually well off, people.
Chip manufactures have very different business from car part manufactures. The car parts manufacturers would love to sell me a new ABS controller, but the chips that go into it are not made anymore and they don't have the ability to get them made in many cases. Most often because they just bought some common part like a 16 bit CPU - when they have their own custom chips they can maybe find someone else to make them (though sometimes this isn't possible)
The surface area of each pin of a plug-in automotive fuse is somewhere around 100-150 mm^2. Vibration, thermal expansion/contraction, etc is easily handled with that much area for maintaining contact.
How big do you want your automotive-grade chips to be?
I have a feeling they could be larger, but I’m very naive in this field. Great point though, I see that the pin outs are fairly expansive on some of the chips in my old car, and they’re likely worse in my newer car. It would be difficult to achieve any kind of secure connection without solder and epoxy.
And we should trust you because...? I wouldn't trust you because of the way you insult professional technicians that work on your car, and obviously know little about the profession.
That, and if you think replacing these parts would involve soldering and not a complete module replacement, I wouldn't trust your opinion on anything electronics-related, either.
This should be something that is pulled as a package and replaced, why would anyone be soldering anything? Do refurbishing off-site if that makes sense.
Component-level repairs died in the consumer market in the early 2000s. The only way to bring it back from the dead would be to release the complete service manuals (i.e. https://www.ebay.com/itm/266686900554)
Actually these are Sams independent repair manuals.
They existed because the manufacturers would not always release the factory schematics or service manuals for mass-produced consumer products.
This proliferated once consumerism & disposable-ism really took off, before that most electronics came with a schematic, but it was still not often up to the standards of places like HP or Tektronix.
So Sams took what info they could get and reverse-engineered the rest as they tore down and scrutinized new equipment to produce these fairly standardized publications that were available by subscription to independent repair operators, covering each popular model from many different manufacturers as they emerged in the marketplace.
A lot of the repair operators were very familiar with gear like HP and Tek and so was Sams.
Most of them had successfully leveraged that kind of top documentation and serviceability to have materially contributed to the winning of World War II. Slouches they were not.
There was a preference not to want to settle for less in consumer electronics so they published their own to make up the difference. If the skills are there why not use them? Especially when a failure is usually only one or a small number of the most common dirt-cheap components that need to be replaced to fix.
Which is what electronics servicing is supposed to be all about from the beginning.
I know it's not the beginning any more but still there was a time when the pros had in the back of their mind the kind of things it might take to win World War III, more so than now.
With people like that around you didn't need right-to-repair laws to be enacted, the whole country was still aware of the benefit of field repair if not improvisation.
All of the overseas Communists were certainly not going to sleep on it.
