The Semiconductor Shortage is Getting Worse (msn.com) 97
"The global semiconductor shortage that has paralyzed automakers for nearly a year shows signs of worsening," reports the Washington Post, "as new coronavirus infections halt chip assembly lines in Southeast Asia, forcing more car companies and electronics manufacturers to suspend production."
A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips...
Demand for the components is soaring as more consumer goods become computerized, but supply is scarce because semiconductor factories are extremely expensive and time-consuming to build... The debacle is likely to cost the auto industry $450 billion in global sales from the start of the crisis through the end of 2022, according to Seraph Consulting. Martin Daum, chief executive of the Daimler AG division that makes trucks and buses, described the problem as intensifying. "Until the second quarter we were able to manage the situation quite well at Daimler Truck," Daum said Wednesday. "But since summer the semiconductor situation has worsened for us. Our production in Germany and the U.S. was affected, which led to a situation in which we could deliver fewer vehicles to our customers."
Even automakers such as Toyota and Hyundai, which planned for potential shortages and initially managed to avoid crippling shutdowns, are starting to encounter problems. Toyota this month was forced to slash production at 14 factories in Japan over a lack of semiconductors. Some of the cuts will continue into October due to a lack of components from Southeast Asia, Toyota has said. Ford and General Motors in recent months have been suspending production for weeks at a time at more than a dozen North American factories... [T]he problem is hurting industries beyond autos. "This is having an impact all across the economy, with automobiles, yes, but even beyond that, into medical devices, networking equipment — we're hearing regularly from companies that cannot get the supply they need," one of the Biden administration officials said...
Some chipmakers have taken steps to help auto manufacturers. Taiwan's TSMC, which produces a type of chip called a microcontroller that is widely used by automakers, said it is increasing output of the components by 60 percent this year compared with 2020. GlobalFoundries is adding manufacturing equipment to a factory near Albany, N.Y., to increase output for all types of chips, and recently broke ground on a $4 billion expansion of its factory in Singapore, with financial support from the Singaporean government. Globally, chip factories have increased their production capacity by 8 percent since early 2020 and plan to boost it by over 16 percent by the end of 2022, according to the U.S.-based Semiconductor Industry Association. Global spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is likely to grow by more than 30 percent this year to $85 billion, showing that chipmakers are expanding production, according to C.J. Muse, a semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI.
But that comes after chip companies had "underinvested over the last five years," he said...
Intel on Friday will break ground on two new chip factories in Arizona, on which it plans to spend $20 billion.
Demand for the components is soaring as more consumer goods become computerized, but supply is scarce because semiconductor factories are extremely expensive and time-consuming to build... The debacle is likely to cost the auto industry $450 billion in global sales from the start of the crisis through the end of 2022, according to Seraph Consulting. Martin Daum, chief executive of the Daimler AG division that makes trucks and buses, described the problem as intensifying. "Until the second quarter we were able to manage the situation quite well at Daimler Truck," Daum said Wednesday. "But since summer the semiconductor situation has worsened for us. Our production in Germany and the U.S. was affected, which led to a situation in which we could deliver fewer vehicles to our customers."
Even automakers such as Toyota and Hyundai, which planned for potential shortages and initially managed to avoid crippling shutdowns, are starting to encounter problems. Toyota this month was forced to slash production at 14 factories in Japan over a lack of semiconductors. Some of the cuts will continue into October due to a lack of components from Southeast Asia, Toyota has said. Ford and General Motors in recent months have been suspending production for weeks at a time at more than a dozen North American factories... [T]he problem is hurting industries beyond autos. "This is having an impact all across the economy, with automobiles, yes, but even beyond that, into medical devices, networking equipment — we're hearing regularly from companies that cannot get the supply they need," one of the Biden administration officials said...
Some chipmakers have taken steps to help auto manufacturers. Taiwan's TSMC, which produces a type of chip called a microcontroller that is widely used by automakers, said it is increasing output of the components by 60 percent this year compared with 2020. GlobalFoundries is adding manufacturing equipment to a factory near Albany, N.Y., to increase output for all types of chips, and recently broke ground on a $4 billion expansion of its factory in Singapore, with financial support from the Singaporean government. Globally, chip factories have increased their production capacity by 8 percent since early 2020 and plan to boost it by over 16 percent by the end of 2022, according to the U.S.-based Semiconductor Industry Association. Global spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is likely to grow by more than 30 percent this year to $85 billion, showing that chipmakers are expanding production, according to C.J. Muse, a semiconductor analyst at Evercore ISI.
But that comes after chip companies had "underinvested over the last five years," he said...
Intel on Friday will break ground on two new chip factories in Arizona, on which it plans to spend $20 billion.
Time to bring production home (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of companies are moving the supply chain 'home' to the US or parts of Europe because they see this problem isn't going away. Between covid, economic and political upheavals, and China threatening Taiwan, it's time to own your production process in a stable region.
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It still in the short term doesn't help. A future plant here or over there is still a future plant. Right now everyone is getting an exercise in perpetual redesign and testing as what's available and what's not constantly changes. On the bright side there's an incentive to recycle items for their chips.
Re:Time to bring production home (Score:5, Insightful)
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One reason why TSMC and other chip making places are hesitant on making new fabs is that it is an incredible investment... and once the shortages are over, companies will be going back to China or wherever it is cheapest. It is like how it was with toilet paper where companies in the US were asked to make some, but as soon as the shortages stopped, all the makers went back to offshore sources.
For fab companies, a shortage is great for business... better than a glut, and if there is a global recession, it w
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> It is like how it was with toilet paper where companies in the US were asked to make some, but as soon as the shortages stopped, all the makers went back to offshore sources.
Toilet paper is overwhelmingly made close to where it is consumed. Do you think it's practical to ship long distances?
Re:Time to bring production home (Score:4, Informative)
Re: Time to bring production home (Score:3)
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The corollary to that, is that tighter global supply chain links leads to peace out of necessity. Localization of supply chains makes the world a less safe place where everybody can act more in their own interests.
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Most the West is either out or going out of the pandemic mode at this point, while places like Malaysia are blowing up with next wave of Delta, which is what's hitting the supply chain.
If plants were in Northern America and Europe, we wouldn't be having the current disruption. The argument you're making has no basis in reality. This is now the pandemic that is no longer causing mass shutdowns in most of the nations located on two aforementioned continents, while still causing mass shutdowns elsewhere.
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Re:Time to bring production home (Score:4, Informative)
Fun part: Hoarding isn't the main problem with global distribution of covid vaccines. Have you looked at the storage requirements for vaccines yet? Especially mRNA ones?
There's a reason why there were several test attempts to distribute those outside first world nations which failed because vaccines spoiled. Even in developed nations, having those extremely low temperature storage spaces is technically difficult to arrange. In most nations, you needed the kind of a facility that even a hospital in a large city couldn't provide at required scale. So you would set up special facilities with built up deep freezer compartments where mass vaccinations would take place. And later on, when you knew distribution amounts needed, you could do short term pretty much "same day" shipping to local pharmacies where storage time would be preferably measured in hours.
Now try to do that in your typical third world nation, where you can't even guarantee that electricity is going to be on 24/7, much less that the entire distribution chain will work like clockwork, as it must.
That is why it was AZ and J&J that were the vaccines that were designed from the start to try to solve the problem worldwide, not mRNA vaccines. And those have their own problems in production and storage still, which is why all those massive surpluses of AZ vaccine after EU largely rejected its usage earlier this year didn't really help the situation in third world. A lot of them still spoiled when they were rejected.
And until we solve the cold storage problem and distribution problems in developing countries, it's very unlikely we'll be able to get the vaccination program going world wide. Even if we were to literally dump every vaccine we can there, today. It would simply spoil.
Re:Time to bring production home (Score:5, Interesting)
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India has had it's own semiconductor problems. [youtu.be] Even China is being hit by counterfeit chips. [youtu.be]
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China is most likely also the source of the counterfeit chips...
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You can thank the US sanctions for that. A lot of people expected the Chinese fab sector to be much larger by now. Just look at how companies like SMIC have been impacted by sanctions to see why that did not happen.
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No, that's because most of the growth of China has been mostly on paper.
Real estate in China is a gigantic scam - there are entire cities built to house millions of people who have a population of under 100,000 people. Oh, if you look at it, every housing unit is sold - because the Chinese people
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SMIC has the capital. But they can't buy the machine tools they need in the open market.
This has delayed their rollout of 14nm capacity as they need to wait for Chinese made machine tools which still don't exist to replace ASML tools.
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Not only the cost, the ramp up time after finances have been secured to the time a fab is ready to produce anything usable is counted in the years usually.
So by the time the new fabs are actually usable, this global shortage may already be over.
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Home or abroad has little to nothing to do with the supply chain issues currently being experienced. Before going on an anti-globalisation rant it pays to understand what is actually going on in an industry.
Re: Time to bring production home (Score:2)
Re:Time to bring production home (Score:5, Interesting)
That's only part of the solution. Another huge problem with this whole mess is logistics.
When the global economy took a nosedive in 2020, a lot of international shipping companies started to scrap their ancient cargo ships. Mooring a container ship costs a serious amount of money, and a lot of them were ancient anyway, so what better time to wreck them? Of course, these ships are missing now. Because shipyards aren't equipped either to build hundreds of new container ships per month, and shipping companies also don't have the money to just buy a few dozen new ship just because there is a current demand. Shipping costs for containers from China have soared, reaching a 500% peak for urgent shipping.
Things are so insane by now that it's more profitable for container ships to just dump their containers out in the US or Europe and immediately sail back empty, even though there is cargo ready to be loaded in the harbor. Because the time it takes to load and unload that return cargo is not worth it.
This also means that China now has a critical lack of containers, while they get scrapped in the US and Europe.
And land logistics ain't much better. In Europe it hit mostly the UK because all the foreign truck drivers went home last year when they got kicked out by their employers, but they don't return because now they're hired back in their home country. The UK currently has a really huge problem with a lack of truck drivers, with gas pumps and store shelves staying empty because the gas and goods simply can't get delivered.
So production alone is not going to solve the problem. You also have to get the distribution back in order.
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It also makes sense why a local chip fab (and by local I mean in your country or region) makes sense: if you can ship via truck and rail, and/or if you can avoid a port and customs, that could be a big savings.
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No, the solution is increased automation and global citizenship. Extreme nationalism and trying to hold on to stupid things will make the situation worse. Extreme nationalism and religious stupidity will end humans, it must be fought.
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And how exactly would global citizenship allow me to buy a graphics card here that is produced in China when there's nobody who would deliver it over here? Should I fly to China to buy a graphics card or what do you suggest?
Re: Time to bring production home (Score:2)
That is bad for innovation and the progress of humanity. Here is the reason: One big factory churning out microchips is a more efficient solution than multiple factories located around the world. The reason being you will need more people to manage and operate semiconductor production. Those are people who instead could be moving humanity and quality of life forward in other ways instead of being stuck in a semiconductor factory. They could instead be involved in producing electric cars or solar panels or h
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One big factory churning out microchips is a more efficient solution than multiple factories located around the world. The reason being you will need more people to manage and operate semiconductor production. Those are people who instead could be moving humanity and quality of life forward in other ways instead of being stuck in a semiconductor factory.
Okay, and what then when the guys running that one big factory retire or get run over by a bus?
How are you going to motivate those guys running the one big factory to work hard or create innovations to improve the production? If they're a defacto monopoly, they'll have zero incentive to anything effciently, because hey, what choice do the customers have?
Re: Time to bring production home (Score:2)
More importantly, we do not live in an ideal world. Covid, natural disasters, and economic/political upheaval are all very real things. We have to plan accordingly.
Moving target. (Score:2)
Notice the biggest sufferer in the story is vehicle manufacturers. Also:
A few weeks ago, CCSI’s circuit-board supplier checked in with a problem: It couldn’t source the semiconductors it had been attaching to the boards that operate the dog-washing booths. It was able to find a similar chip that would work, but because the replacement chip was bigger the circuit-board maker wasn’t sure it would fit inside the machinery.
Maybe there's a shortage of engineers that can keep up with all the redesigns needed as the supply changes.
Re:Moving target. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe there's a shortage of engineers that can keep up with all the redesigns needed as the supply changes.
There's a shortage of management willingness to hire engineers who will/can work for third-world wages in the US or to pay first-world wages.
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Maybe festooning cars with 100+ MCUs and flash [thedrive.com] has something to do with it.
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1. Extremely noisy voltage supply lines.
2. Occasional load dumps, inductive energy returned from starter motor or alternator up to 100V decaying over 0.5 seconds.
3. Very occasionally, extremely short high voltage spikes over 1000V. This was due to wear on comm
Screw the cars (Score:2)
I have orders placed seven months ago for computers which haven't even been made yet. And that includes the monitors, mice, and keyboards which are in the same boat.
Screw the covid excuse. The incompetence of private companies who cancelled their chip orders last year thinking no one would need chips for a few months is staggering.
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I'm curious as to why all shipping seems to be concentrated into a very small number of ports. I've looked and the arguments are not very convincing. Now it's a single point of failure. Whoodathunk?
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Possibly you did not understand the arguments. If you recounted what they were and why you did not find them very convincing someone here could help you.
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Geography dictates how many good ports you are going to have. That simple. Every single major port is a natural harbor, a place where you are shielded from ocean currents, either by being shallow or some other literal physical obstruction (New York is a good example, Long Island shields it from the Atlantic).
Could you physically create a harbor? Sure, it would cost an OBSCENE amount of money to demolish whatever cliffs/mountains/etc to make it level with the water, then somehow clear the area of all underwa
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Not everyone is building a little home office computer for themselves using parts from Microcentre.
Got try and buy computers with quantities over 1000 right now, if you can find someone who will ship this year then let us know.
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Ford somehow suckered people into paying $50k for a pickup truck. You can option a king ranch to over $100k now.
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That 50K pickup truck is much nicer than a 50K Tesla.
Nah. I've owned both. The pickup was a royal pain in the arse and only shines when you have stuff to haul or pull. The Tesla I still own and I'm not getting rid of it any time soon. I enjoy not having to deal with diesel fuel, replacing FICMs, parking in a lot shorter than the vehicle and all the other trials and tribulations of owning a Ford F350.
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Sounds like what you wanted was a Ford Raptor, not an F350. You got the wrong truck.
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The Ford Raptor isn't ideal for pulling a horse trailer, which I needed to do for a while.
I moved house a couple of times and the F350 came in handy but for driving to work (not happening any more post-covid) or shopping, the F350 was not ideal.
After a few months of not using it to haul or pull anything, I dumped it.
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The F350 is a work truck. It worked for what you got it for. The right tool for the job, etc.
The complaints in your earlier post were different. For those kinds of complaints you want a Raptor. It's fun to drive.
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No so much a complaint. It's just how it is. I replaced the F350 (which could pull) with a 350Z (which was fun), replaced that with a Nissan Leaf (which was not fun, but it was mighty cheap and freed me from gas stations) and the Leaf got replaced with the Tesla (which is all sorts of fun).
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That's exactly what I did. Once I didn't need the truck I got rid of it.
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If I’m spending that much it will be on a Porsche Cayenne. Very capable offroad and also reliable. A friend of mine has one and the interior is incredibly nice.
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We could start growing electronics like the way we grow germs. See how well that's currently working out.
Re: I think it's a simple issue to fix (Score:2)
If semiconductors are in short supply they should just use half as many full conductors.
Musk: Global auto chip shortage to end next year (Score:1)
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Exactly. How many years has he claimed Full Self Driving is just around the corner, next year?
I got the FSD beta button today.
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Well, Musk isn't lying when he announces that there are quite a few new chip plants being built on several continents, by different companies.
What you shouldn't believe is that those plants will be online next year. To my knowledge, building a plant might take a year, but then you still need the machines to build chips and those need a lot of tinkering before these can produce sufficient chips to become profitable. Getting qualified personnel in the new plants will also be somewhat of a problem.
As such, I e
Re: Musk: Global auto chip shortage to end next ye (Score:2)
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If China takes over Taiwan, I'd say we'll have just barely enough, and more likely, we'll still have severe shortages.
It takes years to build new fabs, and then they don't even always work. I remember news of Intel "breaking ground" on their "new Arizona fab," for every new US President in the past 20 years. It's been neither new nor ground breaking at all (by now), as far as I can tell.
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Key phrase from Wapo article (Score:3)
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The subsidies are about something else, which is where the new capacity will be. The pure market solution is for consumers here to send China billions of dollars to build new fabs there. But you can see how vulnerable that leaves us.
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"whatever happened to capitalism?"
It was telling GF to add capacity in Singapore.
Hopefully.. (Score:1)
Want examples? Ford, GM, Stallantis for starters.
A lot of companies will return to earlier days when, particularly mechanical devices weren't so tied to semiconductors.
Want examples? John Deere and others, auto manufacturers and others.
Old technology works better when freedom-to-repair is valued.
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A lot of companies will return to earlier days when, particularly mechanical devices weren't so tied to semiconductors.
Ah, the days of the tubes, and the relays. You're typing your post on what again? And just how is it getting to this forum?
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A lot of companies will return to earlier days when, particularly mechanical devices weren't so tied to semiconductors.
Christ no. Do you even realize how much more reliable and long-lived cars are than they were thirty or forty years ago? Electronic tuning and sensors all throughout your car are part of the reason for that.
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Old electronics have their own issues that are in many ways more challenging than old mechanical parts.
Re: Hopefully.. (Score:1)
Electronic tuning and sensors all throughout your car are part of the reason for that.Complexity has not led to reliability; you can thank better materials and less shoddy engineering for that.
On a related note, the highest-reliability IC automobile ever made was the Mercedes Benz W123, cirqa '85. Reply Share Flag
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Re: Hopefully.. (Score:2)
You're hoping for tens to hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs?
a cautionary tale which will be ignored (Score:1)
This is not simply a semiconductor issue.
7 billion people and rising is leaving us in a very precarious situation with regard to supply chains for all sorts of products, like FOOD.
This pandemic, as far as pandemics go, is not that bad. Imagine if this was a smallpox pandemic and 20% of the people who contracted the disease were dying...
Our systems are stretched thin and will be stretched ever so thinner as the population increases.
Couple this with a global fascist tilt and we are truly in a dangerous state
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Good one ! Hahaha.
If this, and this, oh and to explain the facts this and this, then THIS DISASTER ( ok, not a disaster but, if this, it will get worse ).
You do realise you're mad ?
So much for a centralized approach (Score:3, Interesting)
It is not just semiconductors (Score:1)
As an Engineer for an electronics OEM, I can tell you it is not just semiconductors with long lead times and shortages. It is almost every electronic component. For example I am being quoted 36 to 52 weeks on hybrid polymer capacitors. I have customers throttling back production because they cannot get enough steel and aluminum in the particular alloys they use. There are a few large semiconductor foundries announced that will add capacity in 18 month or so, but very few suppliers of other parts seem to
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Stop Using Computer Chips for Unnecessary Things (Score:3)
For example, why the fuck do we have computerized washing machines. Why are there computers in refrigerators? Why do we need computers in light switches (get off your ass and turn them on and off yourself)? Yes, I understand that these can't be repurposed for cars, but why the fuck do we need so many computerized systems in cars? We don't. In fact I would rather have had a car without so much computerization and tracking. But they aren't available. Blame the cars companies, not COVID.
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I was at a security meeting back in 2017 and they said by 2021 they thought the average house would have over 20 devices on the internet. At the time most of us thought - that's BS. We won't be close.
The guy sitting next to me has over 50. I have less than 10. No home automation or any of that BS. My HVAC is all offline still. His house is fricking wired. Cameras, lights, locks, fridge, alexa, etc. He had to fix the IP addresses recently because he switched providers. He said - man, it was terrible having t
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Appliances however can/should stay dumb. And Alexa is a Stassi wetdream and should be illegal.
It is not just computer chips that are scarce (Score:2)
I do a lot of power supply design, and the chips for that are becoming unavailable. Though I don't work on automotive stuff these days, quite a few of the chips I use are targeted at that market. I suspect strategic over-purchasing might be going on. If you can raise the cash, you snaffle all of the stock as soon as it is available. That deprives your competitors of parts. It is a bit like panic buying. You don't need much of that to completely screw up a market, even when there is no real shortage.
In the U
What if the chip manufacturers ... (Score:1)
What if the chip manufacturers had discovered that cutting production by 10% increased prices by 20% ( a la OPEC ) ?
I've got a few PIC16s and a Z80 (Score:2)
Somewhere in my box of electronics crap. I think they cost me a dollar each at some point. What are they gonna fetch me now? A buck ten?
Simple solution? (Score:2)
They made cars 5-10 years ago that didn’t have so many chips in them even though they had less “features.” Why don’t they just go back and produce cars designs again that are six or seven years old but didn’t have so many chips for the next couple of years?
They know all of they suppliers they used then 5-10 years ago and know all the engineering diagrams — why don’t they just produce “chip light” car des
Tell the auto execs I found some chips for them (Score:1)