It’s strange that this happened. Did COVID just cause everyone to stop investing for a bit, leading to all these downstream problems? Or was this gonna happen anyway?
The developer of the O.MG cable has a good Twitter thread describing the issues.
A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
21–30 of 136 posts
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. After they were allowed to start growing again, how long until you see a Banana in your local store? You better be there when they arrive, because everyone else who has been wanting Bananas is waiting too. On top of that, can the Banana grower even get all of the ite…
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. -- But chip manufacturers didn't shut down. That's even close to the immediate cause, which was that the anticipation of changed future demand on the part of other manufacturers lead to them decreasing and change future orders. If you're going to ELI5("explain this t…
A closer analogy might be that all of the banana growers were told they should grow mangos, so the plowed under the banana trees and planted mangos.
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also imagine that there are no truck drivers to drive the bananas from the plantations to your local stores, and no ships to bring fertilizer to the banana plantations. Even when they start growing again, it's going to be a while before you can get one. Supply chains in general are in shambles. We had mass COVID outbreaks at the ports that shut down unloading, as well as outbreaks at see. Truck drivers are quitting b…
> Also imagine that there are no truck drivers to drive the bananas from the plantations to your local stores, and no ships to bring fertilizer to the banana plantations. In the UK, the situation is even worse: because there is an acute shortage of truckers to truck pigs from farms to slaughterhouses and a lack of butchers, 100k pigs are set to be killed and burned - they simply grow each day, and butchers have limit…
> now innocent pigs have to suffer for society's failures.
They were going to be killed no matter what. I don't think it matters much to the pig what happens after it's dead.
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#24Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very difficult to take anything afterward seriously.
I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers?
EDIT: Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought.
https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-sta...
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. After they were allowed to start growing again, how long until you see a Banana in your local store? You better be there when they arrive, because everyone else who has been wanting Bananas is waiting too. On top of that, can the Banana grower even get all of the ite…
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. -- But chip manufacturers didn't shut down. That's even close to the immediate cause, which was that the anticipation of changed future demand on the part of other manufacturers lead to them decreasing and change future orders. If you're going to ELI5("explain this t…
Not that massively, but various plants had to shut down at various times, which really isn't helping matters. It's not just "misjudged demand", that would be relatively easy to fix or be limited to few sectors if everything otherwise ran at needed capacity.
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#26It’s strange that this happened. Did COVID just cause everyone to stop investing for a bit, leading to all these downstream problems? Or was this gonna happen anyway?
Let's say that all Banana growers were shut down for 8 months and during that time all existing supply was bought up that were sitting on store shelves. After they were allowed to start growing again, how long until you see a Banana in your local store? You better be there when they arrive, because everyone else who has been wanting Bananas is waiting too. On top of that, can the Banana grower even get all of the ite…
I don't think it's that the fabs were shut down because of covid, but rather because automotive manufacturers (and presumably others) forecasted record low sales for 2020 and canceled all of their chip orders such that chip suppliers and upstream fabs had to lay off staff and so on. As I understand it, this was what reduced fab capacity, not "fabs were closing to avoid the risk of covid".
On the flip side, rather than demand decreasing as auto manufacturers expected, it actually spiked, and automotive manufacturers demanded more chips and were willing to pay $$$ for it. So other industries that use chips and accurately forecasted their demand were now bidding against automotive manufacturers for that fab capacity.
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#27Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very di…
The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.
You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking.
Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#28Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very di…
The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking. Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their…
I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability?
> It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number.
We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in a technical capacity uses these units seriously. So then if the number is so conceptually massively big and the units don't matter, why go through the extra forced effort of converting to imperial? Just use the units that the specifications come in and the numbers that the factories use?
The more you play with vast unit conversions like this, the more you risk losing information across sources/citations. What if I want to do my own research later on? It's more work if I'm searching for specific numbers on Google. We also know just how terrible Google Search results are getting nowadays, so...
> We all get it, Americans with their imperial units, ha ha.
I think this is an uncharitable interpretation of my comment. I'm not trying to make fun of Americans, I'm trying to understand what the extra efort is worth for?
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#29From TFA: > By 2025, she foresees demand for around 185 million square feet of advanced substrate manufacturing space against about 145 million square feet built. It's curious that the production capacity for substrate is expressed in terms of manufacturing space. Is that an industry-specific quirk?
"On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer.
The hardware designer said: “It is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?”
Master Foo replied with a question: “How many square inches of silicon do you lay out per year?”
“Why...we hardware designers never measure our work in that way,” the man said.
“And why not?” Master Foo inquired.
“If we did so,” the hardware designer replied, “we would be tempted to design chips so large that they cannot be fabricated - and, if they were fabricated, their overwhelming complexity would make it be impossible to generate proper test vectors for them.”
Master Foo smiled, and bowed to the hardware designer.
In that moment, the hardware designer achieved enlightenment."
- Master Foo and the Hardware Designer: http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/index.html
Re: A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between 185 million ft^2 and whatever you pick doesn't matter. It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. You have, and are probably using right now, a voice controlled computer that can convert anything to anything else, by just asking. Is it really worth typing this every time an American site uses American language? We all get it, Americans with their…
I think you might have missed that I already stated that it's an irrational thing to complain about because units in nature are arbitrary, but given that no one uses these units for the topic at hand, why use them at all? Just for relatability? > It may as well be in hectares or "multiples of some lake somewhere", it's a massive number. We're saying the same thing but arguing for the opposite. Like I said, no one in…
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