When you get into high volume production, the vendors have their own engineers who will work with you directly. Depending on the arrangement and your volume they might bill you for the time, require you to buy blocks of support hours, or they might bend over backward to help you out in any way possible if you’re buying enough parts from them.

Dealing with small clients is not a priority for most part vendors. Many of them won’t even sell you chips at all until you can qualify yourself as a big customer or, in some cases, buy a license to start designing with their parts for six figures or more.

Unfortunately for the small players, it’s not a priority for most companies to support small customers who might only buy a couple thousand parts or less.