Do you mean sales of DIP parts is substantially (completely?) to hobbyists, or sales of their entire micro line? One suspects that the hobbyist sales are a rounding error compared to the production quantities being sold to OEMs.



There is a school of thought that says, "get the young hobbyist interested in a component/software package/brand of pencil as a student, and he/she will prefer to use that $THING when hired into a professional gig." That might be somewhat true, but once the new engineer is confronted with any of several realities ("those parts are too expensive"/"they are not a preferred supplier for $ARBITRARY reason" etc) that goes out the window.

And one suspects that the non-student hobbyist market (meaning, "adults who are not working EEs") is completely uninteresting to a semiconductor vendor because those hobbyists will never buy enough parts to matter. Jeez, if you peruse the various DIY electronics forums (good for a laugh), you'll see a lot of threads about, "Want free parts? Go to ti.com and request samples!"

I am all for people playing with electronics as a hobby. I just don't expect the semiconductor vendors to care enough to cater to that market. As an engineer working for a small OEM, we really don't have much influence on commodity ICs and we have to just take what we can get. This reality might be why I'm always amused by the hobbyist crowd's absurd demands.

-a