Why Shortages of a $1 Chip Sparked Crisis in Global Economy (bloomberg.com) 117
To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver. From a report: Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm and Intel going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver chip is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system. The trouble for the chip industry -- and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers -- is that there aren't enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can't keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That's contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators.
"It's not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don't have a display driver, then you can't build your product," says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts -- power management chips are also in short supply, for example -- is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor, Nissan Motor and Volkswagen have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year. The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.
"It's not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don't have a display driver, then you can't build your product," says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts -- power management chips are also in short supply, for example -- is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor, Nissan Motor and Volkswagen have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year. The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.
Error in Summary (Score:5, Informative)
from the first sentence of the summary
Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry...
It is many more than that. [digikey.com]
Re:Error in Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
from the first sentence of the summary
Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry...
It is many more than that. [digikey.com]
British officer trying to explain the importance of each soldier in an army when somebody took a swipe at the rear echelon troops:
... who'd a thunk it??
Imagine a clock, now find the smallest most insignificant looking cogwheel and remove it. What happens to the rest of the clock? Every part of a clock serves a purpose and the clock will case functioning correctly if any one is removed.
A certain PC manufacturer who must not be named lest it trigger a catastrophic psychological melt down is certain people around here tried to move PC production to the US. The project was stymied for a while by the inability of American companies to supply the correct type of screws in the required quantities. Screws
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I only see about 100 different kids of chips on that site. Sure there are about 700,000 different chips, but only 100 different kinds of chips.
Re:Error in Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Screws ... who'd a thunk it??
Me. The US industrial base has been devastated. The people that knew how to make screws and the equipment they used to make screws are gone. The equipment was moved to China. The people retired or are collecting disability. Now the screws are made at much lower cost with complete indifference to worker or environmental protection. That's fine because it all happens far away from the US, so we can keep feathering our regulatory nest without inferring with an industrial base or labor force that no longer exists where the regulations apply.
The thing to do now is use your Chinese made device to explain to me how "that's Capitalism for you," while ignoring the fact that both the regulatory regime that created the incentive to evacuate the US and the trade deals that enabled the evacuation are all a product of government.
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Not entirely true— screws for aerospace parts and some other specialist industries are still mass-produced in the US. Cheap screws with pentalobe heads and 10 different torx variations that are found in Apple’s products are not.
Ironically, Apple’s statement back then foreshadowed our current situation.
Keyword (Score:2)
The keyword here, I think, is "cheap", not "pentalobe" or torx variations, or any of that.
You can get just about anything you want made in the USA - it just isn't going to be cheap.
Though "Expensive" might be as little as 10% more in many cases, with less expense in quality control.
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Making screws is not a particularly environmentally harmful activity. Making the metal for the screws from ore is, but once you have the metal, the machining isn't very polluting. It's not done using open coal fires anymore.
It's also a highly automated process.
It really is a case of corporations that want to save a few cents per thousand pushing the manufacturing off-shore. If other cases hold true here as well, the savings are NOT passed on.
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Screws ... who'd a thunk it??
Me. The US industrial base has been devastated. The people that knew how to make screws and the equipment they used to make screws are gone. The equipment was moved to China. The people retired or are collecting disability. Now the screws are made at much lower cost with complete indifference to worker or environmental protection. That's fine because it all happens far away from the US, so we can keep feathering our regulatory nest without inferring with an industrial base or labor force that no longer exists where the regulations apply.
The thing to do now is use your Chinese made device to explain to me how "that's Capitalism for you," while ignoring the fact that both the regulatory regime that created the incentive to evacuate the US and the trade deals that enabled the evacuation are all a product of government.
That was a sarcastic remark. That being said I completely agree with you although I’d put it down to a lack of investment in high tech facilities as much as offshoring.
Re:Error in Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
The project was stymied for a while by the inability of American companies to supply the correct type of screws in the required quantities
This sounds great until you find out they were trying to make a bulk order of cheap screws, and the US specialized into lower production runs of higher-precision screws. Apple's bulk order was not enough to justify buying the lower-quality but faster equipment.
Basically, they could have bought a machine and filled Apple's order in a month. Then that machine would be idle for 11 months, because all their other customers wanted better screws than that machine could provide. Other customers who want cheap screws were not interested in changing suppliers back to the US.
Since the cost of that machine would be entirely on Apple's order, it would cost way too much to buy the screws.
This was spun by people such as yourself as "The US can't make screws anymore!!!". Which isn't true, but sure is truthy.
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Nope. In fact, the problem was Apple wanted cheap, generic fasteners. The US makes expensive, specialized, extremely high quality fasteners.
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Once you say "hundreds of KINDS" you're just talking about how many categories there are not how many are in each. This would mean millions of actual chip SKUs.
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Surely an electronics site doesn't categorize discrete transistors as integrated circuits.
Nope. Those are separated from the ICs. https://www.digikey.com/en/pro... [digikey.com]
Car piracy. (Score:2, Funny)
...leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year.
"But I never would have bought it anyway".
Live by JIT manufacturing (Score:5, Insightful)
Die by JIT manufacturing.
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Or not outsourcing, or co-locating vendors in your factory. Stockpiling to a degree can be efficient though if you do a supply chain disruption analysis.
Re:Live by JIT manufacturing (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are a small handful of large-scale fabs worldwide, and thousands upon thousands of companies who need chips. It's like suggesting buying a Boeing 737 to avoid getting a middle seat.
And thousands of those companies are in the USA, but almost none of the fabricators are in North America. It's too bad politicians and other leaders don't have to pass a critical thinking test to ensure situations like this don't happen. Situations like your own factories get screwed because you abandoned the ability to control your sources of supply. If you want to an even more current and deadly, but comparable situation, look at Canada who let vaccine manufacturing and research leave the country almost e
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But I'm not so sure that re-shoring will make production more responsive to shifting market forces. Putting up barriers to free trade tends to do the opposite. At least, short of scenarios where bullets start flying.
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They start to look pretty attractive when minor hiccoughs in production lead to billions in losses.
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Die by JIT manufacturing.
Instead they got no gain.
Re:Live by JIT manufacturing (Score:5, Funny)
What, we have an op-amp shortage as well?
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I seriously doubt that many current /. users will understand your excellent joke...
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I get it, but then again I'm a 555*.
*An old timer
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Die by JIT manufacturing.
I've seen people blame the plant closures on JIT, but I just don't get it. Before the advent of JIT, a plant would stock parts on prem for a buffer. The current shortages are idling plants for a month at a time. Am I to understand that in pre-JIT times plants had a month of product laying around?
Next question. There are several plants involved that have been idled repeatedly. There clearly isn't source capacity to restock a month-long buffer. So... doesn't that mean that once the non-JIT buffer is b
Re: Live by JIT manufacturing (Score:2)
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Why not have a month or two of chips on-hand for a large operation? They're small and don't require refrigeration. They don't have expiration dates.
Re:Live by JIT manufacturing (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly, this whole thing has been one of the biggest black swan events in modern times. No one could have correctly predicted everything that happened. Consumer spending definitely did not follow any of the predicted trends. The whole thing has been pretty weird and I'm sure economists will spend the next decade writing papers on it. It's like dropping a bolder into a lake, we're going to be dealing with the ripples from COVID for years. The auto industry did show it learned lessons from the last downturn in 2008, and I'm sure they will learn from this as well and if something like this happens again they will be more prepared for how to handle it.
I read a book on the intro of JIT (Score:2)
When I read a book on the intro of JIT, the title of which I no longer remember, it was worse than that at times. They identified product lines where they had literal years worth of sales* stockpiled because the earlier models looked at production efficiency, not how long it would take to exhaust the produced parts. So a product that was particularly hard to set up, but was fast to run once the setup was done, something that took a lot of machines to make, but the operation at each machine was trivial, wo
The problem isn't JIT (Score:5, Insightful)
Normally what you do here is treat it like a national security issue and subsidize a set of factories that can ramp up to meet demand as needed. Nobody (my country included) did that because it would put upward pressure on local wages by creating jobs while requiring tax increases on the right to pay for it, and we can't have that.
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Well, some countries [reuters.com] are treating it like a national security issue...
Only just now (Score:2)
But putting the jobs aside there's no excuse for the situation we're in now. Worse is how our media barely talks a
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What's amazing is that Toffler predicted this back in 1980 in The Third Wave. He even hinted at in in 1970 in Future Shock.
I'm looking at my copy of Power Shift nervously...
I'm not familair with the guy (Score:2)
Re: The problem isn't JIT (Score:1)
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They've been on a spending spree for at least the last four years! We were trending downward until 2016. No one seems to care.
Still, if we're going to spend, investing in industry and infrastructure seems like a good way to go.
Re:Live by JIT manufacturing (Score:4, Informative)
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Please do not confuse Just-In-Time manufacturing with OUTSOURCING EVERY FUCKING THING to half way around the world.
Oh I'm not.
I've worked in places that manufactured everything but the raw stock for their products.
Every step of the manufacturing process were done within the company.
If you're not able to do that, and using JIT logistics, outsourcing is the next logical step. And the next step after that is shifting the production to wherever it is cheapest.
They done screwed themselves.
Alas... (Score:3)
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"Complicating the picture is that because the profit margin for vaccines is not large, the number of vaccine manufacturers has actually declined quite considerably in the past few decades, leaving only a handful in the U.S. today."
https://www.theatlantic.com/he... [theatlantic.com]
Re: Alas... (Score:1)
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Not unlike vaccines (before the pandemic):
"Complicating the picture is that because the profit margin for vaccines is not large, the number of vaccine manufacturers has actually declined quite considerably in the past few decades, leaving only a handful in the U.S. today." https://www.theatlantic.com/he... [theatlantic.com]
To be fair, that is pretty irrelevant. The problem with making more vaccines isn't total vaccine capacity, it's a very specific, brand new kind of vaccine capacity. A kind of capacity that wasn't used for mass vaccine production before Covid. This was research in Germany targeted at something else - cancer [scmp.com].
Here is a very interesting article about the difficulties of vaccine production [sciencemag.org].
Same issue in Norway. We had an old, low tech vaccine production facility that was closed down some years ago. Some popul [senterpartiet.no]
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It seems that making a part that you can sell for a buck isn't nearly so remunerative as making a part you can sell for a hundred bucks....
Correct, right until you realise for every $100 part you'll sell 1000 $1 parts. This isn't a question of cost. Fabs that manufacture the hundreds of thousands of different ICs in the world that all cost less than a dollar aren't struggling simply because Intel released an 11th gen CPU.
Why do refrigerators need displays? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why do refrigerators need displays?
Because marketing people need them to.
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Refrigerators don't need displays. They need iot devices in them to track what you're doing, so they can sell that information to the surveillance companies, as a recurring revenue stream after the initial sale of the refrigerator. That little message that tells you if the door is ajar also noticed when you opened and closed the refrigerator door, what time it was, what the ntp synchronized timestamp was, etc.. it's fairly straightforward from that, to know who is home when, what adds to show you, when tele
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The other side of that argument is that people want refrigerators with fancy bullshit. If nobody bought them then companies would stop selling them. But people keep buying them so...
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True, people are buying, but I think that a nonzero fraction of fancy bullshit smartfridge purchases come from people who either didn't have a choice or don't care.
It's been years since I bought a new fridge, but if I just needed a fridge today and the dumb fridges are out of stock, or just not being sold any more, I'd get a smart fridge and be counted among those who demand smart fridges.
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I just checked Lowe's. They have 1138 models of refrigerator. 129 of those are 'smart'. If people are buying smart refigerators, it sure as hell isn't because they don't have a choice.
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You ever tried to buy a non-smart TV with decent picture quality? Sometimes you're forced to buy features you don't want just to get the things you do want.
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That isn't necessarily true either. Try to buy a "dumb" TV. Good luck. Odds are you'll end up with at least a moderately smart TV that lets you turn the smarts off and the marketers will count you as a consumer that likes smart TVs.
Much like people buy the razor thin iPhone and make it thick by putting it in a protective box of some kind (sometimes with a booster battery), then Apple says "AHH, the customer wants it thinner! And they don't care about battery size!"
Re:Why do refrigerators need displays? (Score:5, Informative)
If there is such a bad chip shortage then don’t waste chips on things that don’t need them. Also how many chips are being wasted on IoT garbage that we could reclaim capacity from?
none, unfortunately. this is complicated, and it's down to geometries. you simply cannot take a design targetted for a particular Foundry at a particular geometry and just blithely assume it will work on completely different equipment. aside from anything the lithographic masks are so fragile you absolutely cannot go shipping them from place to place, even if they'd fit
the problem has been caused by the Automotive Industry themselves. they are what we might call "Cheap Basturds" and have been ordering for decades from the exact same suppliers at the absolute lowest geometries possible (360nm usually). absolutely nobody but MOSFET and transistor manufacturers are interested in this older geometry.
then along came a thing last year that caused every Automotive company to stop ordering ASICs. and guess what? there weren't any other orders, so they shut the equipment down (powering it off).
here's where the problems start: that older equipment, probably around 30 years old, would have cooled down and become damaged - probably irrevocably. so, with no orders, and with no way to recover the equipment, the Fabs scrapped it.
then a year later, the Automotive companies start demanding supply again. they're told, "i'm sorry, but the equipment's been scrapped". what they then find out is that there is *no other supplier in the entire world* still running that 30-year-old 360nm technology.
at that point they started panicking and moaning to Momma Govt, "waa, waa, i want my subsdies, boo hoo, waaa waaa". on receipt of these subsidies, they basically have to start from scratch **REDESIGNING** entire ASIC ranges to use more modern geometries (180nm) because (see 1st paragraph) you simply cannot take NDA'd 360nm designs and shove them onto a 180nm Fab: it doesn't work that way.
of course, now, they're competing with consumer-grade ASIC companies, which is why TSMC is now at 105% capacity, and older 180nm Fabs in Wales and other parts of England have been re-opened and/or are now overbooked with orders.
all because U.S. Automotive companies couldn't be bothered to think of the consequences of having a single supplier and what would happen if they cancelled massive orders to those single suppliers.
Re:Why do refrigerators need displays? (Score:4, Informative)
all because U.S. Automotive companies
Actually this one can't be blamed on the US companies alone. This stupidity is industry wide. The Germans and the French are bitching to the EU, and the Koreans are also crying to their government.
The only portion of the industry actually seemingly okay seems to be the Japanese with both Toyota and Honda saying they aren't affected.
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> If there is such a bad chip shortage then don’t waste chips on things that don’t need them
That is exactly how a free market works.
The price of a good is such that supply meets demand. If there is a shortage, it means that the supply is too low for the current demand. If we raise prices fewer people will be willing to buy it (demand goes down). Raise the price enough and demand will go down to where it meets supply.
As the price of display drivers goes up, some manufacturers (refrigerator
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Or here in the real world, they'll figure things will soon even out so they might as well buy that new winter yacht and an NFT or 3. OM NOM NOM, MORE MONEY!
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Yeah, that is perfectly fine. If they do that, the competitors will jump at the opportunity for some profit and product the demanded chip.
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Nope. They'll either do the same thing or they'll plow a bunch of money into expanding capacity only to see production catch up with demand and promptly mothball the expansion, carrying residual extra costs for years.
That's the reality of chasing bubbles when manufacturing complexity creates long lead times.
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We're not. Your shitty car is not more important than my IoT garbage. Frankly you don't need car, use a bicycle. Who are you to decide what is or isn't important?
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No, I don't understand the "IoT". It fails for me at "Why?"
It’s (Score:3)
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Re:It's (Score:4, Interesting)
Patents?
No.
Chip manufacturers realized a long time ago that second sources were critical to their business. No serious equipment manufacturer would design in a chip that was available only from one supplier. So the chip manufacturers would license their particular technologies to their competitors who would make exact-copy, exact-spec chips (at least on paper) with the same part number, maybe a different prefix thrown in. So you got, back in the day, genuine TI SN7400 NAND gates or the Motorola equivalent of MC7400, or the National Semiconductor version NC7400. Aficionados would argue back and forth about which versions were actually better, but all of them met the specification for TI's part.
Patents did not prevent this strategy from happening. I'd argue that, in this case, it probably reinforced things and drove progress: without patents, there would be no reason for Motorola or National to have matched TI's specifications, and we'd have had a gazillion different versions of the initial ICs that created the semiconductor revolution. Multiple different specs would have frustrated progress substantially. Instead, because each manufacturer had a licensing agreement which, certainly, including adhering to the electrical and functional specifications of the licensed IP, a designer could be assured that any manufacturer's chip would work. That flexibility was a godsend.
I recall an explosion of TTL chips when licensing expired on the 7400 series from no-name manufacturers and they were, from experience, cheaper but also inferior. You did not want to use them, if you could avoid it.
So, blame lots of other things, but here, in this case here, patents were a win for everyone.
Today, second-source licensing is not nearly as common, and it's one of the many reasons that, for example, I refrain from designing with MAXIM or Linear Technology chips if I can, as those two companies tend to not license their designs. If they are out of one particular device, it can be months before it becomes available again. MAXIM's the worst for supply hiccoughs like that. Sometimes, you can't avoid specifying an Linear Tech or MAXIM chip when there's some specialty feature you really need, but even then, I try to find some other way in my designs.
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Yup. maxim has been on my do not use list for 20 years now for being burned one too many times on unavailability.
It's the same for most chips (Score:3)
In the industry I'm working in, we have significant shortage issue with all the main players for all sorts for chips, not just drivers.
What I mean is, if you have everything in you design, except "1 chip", than you cannot sell. That statement is true for most of the stuff we use. Sometime you can find a replacement, but many times, this is not the case!
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AMD was a second source for "Intel 8086-compatible" processors (produced by Intel) since about 1982, when both companies were basically unknown and IBM needed somebody else to make "x86" processors.
That was back in the days when "Big Blue" made expensive computers, not the cheap, $2,000 kind (IBM XT)
Nonsense (Score:2)
It's merely a question of ramping up production and second-sourcing the production.
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Tesla touchscreens for all! (Score:2)
Oh God! They might have to revive physical buttons for the wiper controls for next model year.
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> They might have to revive physical buttons for the wiper controls for next model year.
I might be a nerd who supports Tesla's mission but also an HCI nerd who's studied HID interaction. No touchscreen Teslas in my future.
Given that they sell every one they manufacture, they're not vying for our market segment yet.
Re: Tesla touchscreens for all! (Score:1)
Believe it or not, I have no strong opinion about electric cars in general or Tesla's "mission" but the insistence on weird UI, never-quite-ready for prime time self-driving, gull wing doors that won't fit into most people's garages and present a serious hazard around small children, self-opening doors that open into traffic, and lack of door handles for emergency egress/rescue makes me actively distrustful of the company and seriously doubt the mental capacity of the people who put down 100k for these thin
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Re: Tesla touchscreens for all! (Score:1)
I'm looking. The 15A 120v outlets in the Toyotas are nice, but almost all the ones on the market are just too damned underpowered for their weight. I drive a fairly wimpy 4 cylinder sedan and the power to weight on the hybrid suvs and crossovers is exactly the same, except they're taller and therefor pokier at highway speeds.
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I know. How horrible that people will be able to, without thought or their eyes leaving the road, turn on/off their wipers or adjust wiper speed.
It's a travesty they won't have to poke around on a screen hoping to tap the right spot several times to do something so simple.
Call me, I can help (Score:2)
I have a few VIC 6560 and VIC-II 6567 video chips lying around if it can help.
Two words. (Score:2)
Chip Equivalent of Ball Bearings (Score:5, Insightful)
It is always the small things. Ball bearings are always a critical item for national defense, because a) if you don't have them, nothing moves, and b) they don't last forever. Back in 1988, when we still had a cold war, people were warning about loss of domestic bearing manufacturing:
https://apnews.com/article/4e2... [apnews.com]
Now every last damn thing has chips in it. Things like power regulators, display drivers and such are just modern ball bearings.
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1988? Fletch warned us that it was all ball bearings in 1985.
LOL what a bunch of whiners! (Score:2)
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Yumm, delicious giant old transistors in a TO-92 package. Might take a few of those to do the job, but I like the way you think!
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They come in SOT-23 now, for a long time now in fact. xD
Just super-glue those suckers right down and use a little wire-wrap wire to connect them. See how easy? xD
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Idunno, I wanna be skeptical, but superglue AND wire-wrap? I mean, with it all so over-engineered like that, how can it not work?
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Called (Score:2)
> a one-dollar part called a display driver.
It's not "called" a display driver. It just *is* a display driver. What kind of site is it, dammit
FPGA? (Score:2)
I once built a VGA driver on an FPGA development board in a few weeks, as a side project. It's not that difficult - it was perhaps a few hundred (maybe a thousand?) lines of VHDL. Depending on the complexity of the display, they might be able to do it with a CPLD. Yes, you'd have to redo the board design and layout, but a competent HW team could do this in a matter of weeks. It's not that hard.
What's happening here is the manufacturers would rather whine about a chip shortage than actually do a board
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You’ve not worked in Automotive. The recertification costs are huuugge. Redo, EMC, Thermal testing, MTBF, Failure Mode Saftey etc etc which can often take a year or more.
Design tradeoffs (Score:2)
A pox on the house of small companies that design devices around other small companies' chips. If one of those companies goes BK, your product goes poof too. If I can't buy it at Mouser or Digikey, don't waste my time.
Blame Apple (Score:2)
The pioneered this phone style we all have now. If it breaks, just throw it away. The amoled display of my first phone would be perfectly fine on the latest if there was a standard for parts and form factors.
Any Slashdotters remember Sumitomo? (Score:4, Interesting)
Early 90s... an explosion at a chemical plant that made an Epoxy Resin used int he manufacture of IC chips, in particular DIP chips used for RAM at the time.
The immediate response was that the price of RAM (and no other chips) TRIPLED in price over night.
The problem was... the resin cost $6/lb and never increased in price. Sumitomo had a 6 month stockpile untouched by the explosion. Companies that made use of the resin pellets for RAM production also had 6~12 month stockpiles. In fact, they weren't even scheduled to produce any of the resin for months.
Needless to say, the production resumed long before there was any real shortage, but prices did not fall until systems required a magnitude greater level of RAM.
Later, we saw a flooded Thailand that somehow crippled hard drive production... again, an artificial jump in prices that has never really returned to reality.
Big tech manufacturers and their distributers will always seek to turn crises into money machines.
The results of a shock inflation (Score:2)
Yes, car manufacturers reduced orders because they expected much lower demand, but why the demand didn't go as low as they expected?
Yeah, more or less (Score:1)
Thanks to the make up o