Last updated: July 9, 2026 · ≤12-minute read
The short version
More than 620,000 electronic part numbers went obsolete in 2025, and about half of them were discontinued without a product change notification. If your product ships for seven years and carries three hundred components, discontinuation is not a risk — it is a schedule. The companies that handle it cheaply run two loops:
A proactive loop that knows, part by part, where the bill of materials (BOM) stands in its lifecycle — and fixes the worst exposures at design time, when a fix is an alternate part number instead of a board respin.
A reactive loop that treats every end-of-life notice as a timed, repeatable process: validate the notice, quantify exposure, walk a fixed resolution ladder from cheapest to most expensive, size the last-time buy with explicit assumptions, and document the decision.
If you do nothing else this quarter: put every part of your BOM through a lifecycle-status check, subscribe to your manufacturers’ change notifications for every part you buy, and pre-agree who owns the decision when a notice lands. The rest of this playbook is the detail.
What the words actually mean
Obsolescence has a precise definition. The international obsolescence-management standard IEC 62402:2019 defines it as the transition of an item that is still required from being available to no longer being available from its manufacturer. The item didn’t stop working, and you didn’t stop needing it — the supply stopped. (For DACH readers: the standard exists in German adoption as DIN EN IEC 62402:2025-05.)
Manufacturers signal where a part stands with lifecycle statuses. The two systems you will meet most often — the five statuses of Texas Instruments (TI) and the six of NXP — map like this:
Three distinctions prevent expensive confusion. First, Not Recommended for New Designs (NRND) is not End of Life (EOL): NXP states explicitly that under NRND “no discontinuance decision has been made” and longevity commitments are honored — it is a warning, not a deadline. Second, a product change notification (PCN) and a discontinuance notice are different instruments: per TI’s policy, a PCN announces major changes affecting form, fit, function, quality or reliability; a discontinuance notice ends supply. Third, allocation is not obsolescence — demand exceeding supply on an active part is a shortage problem, often the opposite signal.
How much warning are you entitled to? Less than you’d hope. The semiconductor industry’s discontinuance standard, JEDEC JESD48C (2011; current revision: J-STD-048A, December 2025), set the floor: at least 6 months from the notice to place final orders, and 12 months from the notice for final shipments. Some manufacturers commit to more — TI’s published schedule allows 12 months for the last order plus an additional six months for final delivery. But treat every floor as theoretical: in 2025, per Z2Data’s database analysis, 52% of discontinued part numbers carried no PCN at all.
The 2026 landscape in numbers
The stat that sets the tempo: 621,909 manufacturer part numbers (MPNs) went obsolete in 2025 — and 323,286 of them, 52%, were not accompanied by a PCN from the manufacturer. (Source: Z2Data database analysis, March 2026; vendor-reported figures from its proprietary component database.)
The volume is volatile, not steadily rising — Z2Data’s own history shows roughly 530,000 discontinuations in 2021, over 750,000 in the 2022 post-shortage peak, about 470,000 in 2023, then 2025’s 622,000. Plan for waves, not a trend line.
Two structural facts make the waves hurt. The first is the lifecycle mismatch: automotive products are engineered for fifteen-plus years of service, while industry commentary puts many semiconductors at under seven years to EOL — and long-lived industrial equipment faces the same mismatch. The gap turns every long-lived product into a rolling series of obsolescence events. The second is that supply cut-offs no longer come only from manufacturers’ portfolio decisions. The Nexperia episode of late 2025 made that concrete: after the Dutch government took control of the chipmaker under the Goods Availability Act on September 30, 2025, China’s Ministry of Commerce on October 4 blocked exports of certain finished components from Nexperia’s Chinese operations — cutting supply of ordinary, active parts with zero notice. The acute phase eased when the Dutch order was suspended in November 2025 amid Chinese supply-easing measures, but the lesson stands: a geopolitical event can behave exactly like an EOL notice you never received. The playbook below works for both.
The reactive loop: when the notice lands
Step 1 — Validate the notice and extract the two dates
Read the notice itself, not the distributor summary. You need the last-order date and the last-ship date — they are different commitments, both set out in the notice. Confirm which of your part numbers (including customer-specific variants) are affected, and log the notice where engineering and purchasing both see it. If the part went obsolete without a notice — the 52% case — your monitoring tool or distributor stock-out is the notice; validate against the manufacturer’s lifecycle page before acting.
Step 2 — Quantify exposure to end of support
One number drives everything: units needed until your product’s end of support. Pull every assembly that uses the part (where-used), then add production demand, service and warranty demand, and expected scrap. A part costing €0.40 can gate a €4,000 product; exposure is the product revenue at risk, not the component spend. This is also the moment to check whether the same notice quietly hits other boards in your portfolio.
Step 3 — Walk the resolution ladder, cheapest first
The US Department of Defense (DoD) obsolescence guidebook SD-22 — the closest thing the discipline has to a canonical playbook — organizes resolutions into three categories of rising complexity: use existing material, substitute, or redesign. Its January 2016 edition tabulated average implementation costs from a 2014 US Department of Commerce survey — roughly $1,000 for the simplest resolution to over $10 million for a complex system redesign — figures the guidebook itself flagged as likely underestimates. The guidebook has been updated repeatedly since (a March 2024 edition restated cost factors in FY2024 dollars; the currently listed edition is dated January 2026). The exact numbers age; the logic does not: from the cheapest rung to the most expensive, the documented cost span is roughly four orders of magnitude.
If the timeline is too short to walk the ladder calmly — the notice reached you late, or never — that is the acute case Meritong’s NRND Fire-Drill exists for.
Step 4 — Size the last-time buy with explicit assumptions
There is no standard formula, and serious sources admit it: SD-22’s January 2016 edition put it plainly — because reliability and end-of-life dates are estimates, “accurately determining the quantity of an item to buy is nearly impossible.” What you can do is make every assumption visible. A worked example:
- Production: 2,400 units/year, planned until product EOL in 3 years → 7,200
- Service & warranty: 600 units/year across a 7-year support tail → 4,200
- Scrap and attrition at 3% of consumption → ≈340
- Minus stock on hand and open orders → −1,500
- Last-time buy ≈ 10,240 → order 10,500 with the margin deliberately on the high side, because the failure modes are asymmetric: overbuying writes off components; underbuying triggers the redesign you were avoiding — at the ladder’s worst rung, on someone else’s schedule.
Then treat the stored parts as an asset with a shelf life: moisture-sensitive packages and solderability degrade in storage — SD-22 warns that plastic-encapsulated parts absorb moisture and are damaged in reflow if not baked out — so specify dry storage, moisture-barrier packaging, and periodic solderability checks in the purchase, and put the carrying cost (capital, storage, insurance) into the comparison against rung 3 and 4 options.
Step 5 — If the open market is unavoidable, put guardrails on it
When stock, aftermarket, and crosses all fail, the independent/broker market is what remains — and it is where counterfeits live. ERAI, the industry’s counterfeit-parts reporting clearinghouse, logged 1,055 suspect parts in 2024 (a figure inflated by one 248-part government batch report; the underlying increase was 3%). Obsolete parts were, as always, the most-reported category at 42.75% — but active, readily available parts accounted for a substantial share too, so scarcity is not the only trigger. The working guardrails: buy only against full traceability, use the counterfeit-avoidance standards as your contract language — SAE AS5553 for your own organization’s process, AS6081 for what you require of independent distributors — and put third-party test-lab inspection between the shipment and your production line.
Step 6 — Document, then tell your customers
Record the decision: the notice, the exposure math, the option chosen and why, the assumptions in the buy quantity. That record is what turns the next notice into a process instead of a crisis — and if you sell to OEMs, it is what lets you notify your customers properly — JESD48C expects distributors and authorized agents to pass discontinuance notices down the chain.
The proactive loop: before the notice
In the BOMs I audit, obsolescence exposure is usually untracked until the first line-down scare — and then it is tracked obsessively for eighteen months and forgotten again. A durable proactive loop is smaller and duller than that:
Score the BOM. For every part: lifecycle status (from the manufacturer’s page, not the distributor’s), a forecast of years-to-EOL where available, number of qualified sources, and single-fab or single-geography flags. Lifecycle-intelligence platforms (Z2Data describes its approach as forecasting time-to-EOL from market demand, manufacturing sites, technology roadmaps, and part activity; SiliconExpert and Accuris, among others, operate in the same category) automate this — but a spreadsheet against manufacturer lifecycle pages beats nothing, and beats most companies.
Design for exit. Prefer parts with a published longevity commitment — TI, for instance, states its products typically live 10–15 years and are not considered for discontinuation while they have recent sales, current demand, or under ten years in production. Prefer parts with existing crosses; avoid designing a sole-source part into a load-bearing role without a documented exit plan.
Put it in the contracts. PCN and discontinuance notices routed to a monitored address (not a person who left two years ago); last-time-buy rights; where the leverage exists, escrow or technology-transfer clauses — the JESD48C negotiation lever works best when it’s pre-agreed.
Give it an owner and a cadence. One named owner, a quarterly BOM review, and a standing agenda item beats a task force after the fact. In the DACH region, the Component Obsolescence Group Deutschland (COGD) — the German industry association for obsolescence management, which also maintains the smartPCN digital notification standard — is where the practitioners compare notes.
Glossary
Obsolescence — an item still in use becoming unavailable from its manufacturer (IEC 62402). End of Life (EOL) — the manufacturer is discontinuing the part; ordering windows apply. Not Recommended for New Designs (NRND) — sunset signal; supply continues, new designs should look elsewhere. Product Change Notification (PCN) — advance notice of a major change to form, fit, function, quality or reliability. Discontinuance (EOL) notice — the formal notification that supply will end, with last-order and last-ship dates. Last-order date / last-ship date — deadline to place final orders / final delivery date; both set in the discontinuance notice. Last-time buy (LTB) — the final purchase covering remaining lifetime demand (also: lifetime or life-of-need buy). DMSMS — Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Material Shortages; the US DoD’s umbrella term — loss or impending loss of manufacturers or suppliers of items, raw materials, or software. Allocation — demand exceeding supply for an active part; a shortage, not obsolescence. Authorized aftermarket — continuation manufacturing/supply licensed by the original component manufacturer (OCM). Die/wafer banking — storing unpackaged silicon for later packaging, extending supply past fab shutdown. YTEOL — years-to-EOL; a forecast of remaining lifecycle, produced by lifecycle databases.
FAQ
Is NRND a reason to redesign now?
Usually not. NRND means no discontinuance decision has been made and existing commitments are honored — for parts already in your product it is a monitoring trigger and a reason to identify a cross, not an automatic respin. For new designs it is a hard “pick something else.”
Why can’t I just switch to the successor part, like a software upgrade?
Sometimes you can — when the manufacturer names a replacement and it truly matches, that is rung 1 or 3 of the ladder. But a component has no abstraction layer: its “interface” is its entire physical and electrical behavior — package, pinout, tolerances, timing, thermal profile — including behavior your circuit relies on without the datasheet promising it. A successor is a different physical object, so the swap means requalification and can reopen certification work, and units already in the field never upgrade at all. And most discontinued parts have no designated successor — which is why the resolution ladder exists, with redesign as its most expensive rung, not its default.
How much notice am I entitled to when a part is discontinued?
The JEDEC discontinuance standard (JESD48C; current revision: J-STD-048A, December 2025) set a floor of 6 months from notice for final orders and 12 months from notice for final shipments; some manufacturers commit to more (TI: 12 months to order, plus 6 to deliver). In practice, per Z2Data, 52% of 2025’s discontinued part numbers carried no PCN — build the loop assuming the notice may not come.
How big should a last-time buy be?
Production demand to product end-of-life, plus service demand across the support tail, plus scrap, minus stock — with every assumption written down and the buffer set by asymmetry: under-buying costs a redesign, over-buying costs inventory. No formula removes the estimation risk; even SD-22 (in its 2016 edition) called exact quantities “nearly impossible.”
Are broker-market parts for EOL components safe?
Treat them as guilty until tested. ERAI logged 1,055 suspect counterfeit and nonconforming parts in 2024, with obsolete parts the largest category — buy on traceability, contract to AS6081, verify through a test lab, and prefer authorized aftermarket sources where they exist.
Does obsolescence only affect old designs?
No. Discontinuations hit part numbers at every lifecycle age — over 620,000 in 2025 alone, half without notification — and supply can vanish for non-portfolio reasons too, as the 2025 Nexperia export-control episode showed for active parts. Monitor the whole BOM, not the gray-haired corner of it.
What’s the difference between DMSMS and obsolescence?
Obsolescence is one cause; DMSMS is the umbrella. A part can be obsolete with no supply problem (stock everywhere), and a supply problem can exist with no obsolescence (allocation, export controls, a supplier bankruptcy). The management loop is the same either way.
Obsolescence exposure is a dependency you can name
A BOM’s obsolescence risk is rarely alone: the same audit that finds the NRND part in a load-bearing socket usually finds the single-sourced module next to it and the retail-priced reseller behind both. That is what a Lock-In Map is for — a 2–4 week audit of your BOM and supply chain that names each dependency, obsolescence exposure included, and what it would cost to break. If it doesn’t uncover savings worth more than the fee, you don’t pay.
Figures and standards cited were verified against the linked sources on July 9, 2026. Lifecycle statuses, notice policies, and discontinuation volumes change — verify part-level status against the manufacturer’s current lifecycle page before acting. This article is general information, not procurement or engineering advice for any specific part — and not legal advice; I am not an attorney or licensed customs broker. For export-control or contract questions specific to your situation, consult qualified counsel.