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From my experience no one cares if they are as long as they more or less work.

Source: I'm a software engineer who has had to fix so many issues due to unannounced component changes from suppliers.

"Oh you just replaced the specific USB chip with something different that has a whole lot of errata (Bugs in chip logic that you have to work around in software) and didn't tell us? GREAT! THANKS!"



Oh man. I just did a board bring-up recently and didn't notice that the flash chip I was having trouble with was a previous version than the one we specified. I only just barely managed to get those boards working, and best as I can tell, it was the conductivity of the particular flux I was using to reflow the part that was nudging an NC connection to actually use it's internal pull-up. When the factory couldn't follow my steps, they finally realized that if they were going to substitute that chip, they'd need to add a 10k pullup resistor on a pin that had a use on that revision but not on the one we wanted. What's worse, is even if I'd noticed that the chip was older, looking at the datasheet for it that I had access to, nowhere did it mention a need for a pullup on that pin. Only the factory datasheet mentioned issues with the internal pullup and suggested using an external one.




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