1. Purpose of the gate
Marking a product not recommended for new designs tells the market that the product's future is limited while its present supply continues. Customers already shipping it can keep doing so. Customers starting a new design are told to choose something else, because a part chosen now may not be available for the whole life of their system. The marking protects both sides: new customers avoid designing in a part that will be withdrawn, and the business avoids taking on new long-life commitments it would later struggle to honour.
The gate follows a lifecycle review that decided to phase the product down, and comes before the discontinuance decision. It is easy to confuse with that later decision, and the difference matters. Not recommended for new designs is a published status: it changes what the datasheet, the product pages and the ordering systems say, and how sales responds to new opportunities. It does not set last-time-buy or last-time-ship dates and does not start a notice period. Customers should be able to read it and know that nothing about their current supply has changed.
The product lifecycle sets four criteria: the phase-down decision recorded at a lifecycle review, a successor or alternative named where one exists, the product status updated on the datasheet, the product pages and the ordering systems, and existing customers told that supply continues and how they will hear of any discontinuance. IEC 62402 describes obsolescence management, including why early and clear status information helps customers plan, and long-life market agreements often ask for exactly this kind of advance warning.
On this lifecycle's product status scale the product stays in Production, the span that runs from the launch review to the discontinuance decision. Many suppliers publish not recommended for new designs as a status word of its own, and this gate is where that word is applied, late in the Production span and before the product becomes Discontinued.
No engineering gate in the lifecycle data matches or feeds this gate; it is the business's own. It rests on engineering evidence from elsewhere: the readiness of a successor, through its own samples and production release in the SoC, analog and mixed-signal, multi-die or FPGA lifecycles, and the derivative and cost reduction options that the lifecycle review compared before choosing to phase down.
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