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Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

blog.robertelder.org

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Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#51

Post by mywittyname »

zargon wrote: post #33
swamp40 wrote: post #29

I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs. They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers). I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps. I don't even know where they all went. It's not like yo…

It's not TSMC capacity that's the problem. It's the large nodes that make everything except cutting-edge processors. Nobody builds a new large-node fab, but demand for large node components keeps rising.

Demand for semiconductors only recently exploded. In 2016, annual growth suddenly tripled for a few years. It's hard to know if this rate of growth is sustainable, or if it will fall back to "normal" again soon.

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#52

Post by blueflow »

tomn wrote: post #47
blueflow wrote: post #2

Fun fact: Solar cells and the LEDs are the same element. If you wire up a solar cell like an LED, it glows dimly in infrared. QA uses this to diagnose dysfunctional wafers.

Here's a video of a circuit I made which flashes an LED, using only power collected by the LED: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BM7VDOoFIWI The LED is the component on the left; there's a very dim flash (pretty much just the black die turning red) at around 11s, then every few seconds. I can't remember exactly how it works... I think there's two capacitors charged up to the voltage of the LED in parallel through high-val…

Now this is the most impressive thing i've seen today! Especially because its made out of discrete components. Kudos.

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#53

Post by swamp40 »

bluesquared wrote: post #36
swamp40 wrote: post #29

I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs. They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers). I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps. I don't even know where they all went. It's not like yo…

It's my current living nightmare. Endless treadmill of: 1. Our contract manufacturer calls in a panic no longer able to obtain/was shorted on a shipment of part XYZ. XYZ is increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts like MOSFETS, oscillators, to slightly-more-complicated but not "fancy" stuff like serial transceivers, USB stuff, NOR flash, load switches. TI is the bane of my existence currently. 2. Search for a d…

Your OODA loop is way too long. We buy ALL the parts immediately, within 10 minutes of finding something. If they don't work, it's a loss.

On new designs, I find a part in stock, we order ALL we need for the next year, and THEN I make a footprint and put it in the design. For EVERY SINGLE PART. Starting with the IC's. It actually works quite nicely once you get used to it. Obviously, there are some losses there too - just the cost of doing business in these crazy times.

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#54

Post by jjoonathan »

lb1lf wrote: post #28
dragontamer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, EPROMs are extremely vintage. They were replaced by EEPROMs - the first of which came out in 1977. That's an... extremely vintage example. IIRC, EPROMs were still cheaper than EEPROMs for many years. EPROMs probably were sold in commercial quantities well into the 80s, and maybe used in the 90s. EPROMs were erased by just throwing them into a UV-bin and blasting them with UV light. In contrast, EEPROMs needed…

Studying EE in the late nineties, I can remember coming across EPROM microcontrollers a few times, but definitely not in new projects. IIRC, students recently graduated when I was doing my freshman year had used them for projects in their freshman year, but not since - so they were probably commonplace until 1990 or so. At least in Trondheim, Norway.

I just flashed (literally, shined UV light through the window) and reprogrammed a few EPROMs on a pair of HP 83623a signal generators yesterday to facilitate moving a module from one, where we didn't need it, to another, where we did.

Industrial equipment moves at a different pace, and in these days of 10x price jumps and "52 week" lead times, sometimes dusty relics from the 80s wind up being relevant in 2022!

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#55

Post by bluesquared »

swamp40 wrote: post #53
bluesquared wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my current living nightmare. Endless treadmill of: 1. Our contract manufacturer calls in a panic no longer able to obtain/was shorted on a shipment of part XYZ. XYZ is increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts like MOSFETS, oscillators, to slightly-more-complicated but not "fancy" stuff like serial transceivers, USB stuff, NOR flash, load switches. TI is the bane of my existence currently. 2. Search for a d…

Your OODA loop is way too long. We buy ALL the parts immediately, within 10 minutes of finding something. If they don't work, it's a loss. On new designs, I find a part in stock, we order ALL we need for the next year, and THEN I make a footprint and put it in the design. For EVERY SINGLE PART. Starting with the IC's. It actually works quite nicely once you get used to it. Obviously, there are some losses there too -…

Wish my slow corporate behemoth would support this, but they are the opposite of agile.

It's also gotten to the point where there doesn't exist enough stock in distribution to buy a year's worth. And I'm not talking high volume, maybe 1k/year to 50k/year. Distributors are constantly decommitting from orders, broker stock is drying up, etc

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#56

Post by mywittyname »

genericone wrote: post #8
NikolaNovak wrote: post #5

I used to be a professional computer geek on weekdays and professional photographer on weekends; and 20 years on, it still blows my mind the similarities between the materials and manufacturing of the CPU doing heavy work in my laptop and the sensor gathering pixels in my camera :O

Transistors! E.g. EPROM (memory type chip) is typically deleted by shining a uv light on the actual silicon die, through a uv transparent quartz window in the final packaged chip. edit: fixed EEPROM -> EPROM

Hence, why we "flash" certain components.

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#57

Post by jjoonathan »

zargon wrote: post #33
swamp40 wrote: post #29

I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs. They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers). I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps. I don't even know where they all went. It's not like yo…

It's not TSMC capacity that's the problem. It's the large nodes that make everything except cutting-edge processors. Nobody builds a new large-node fab, but demand for large node components keeps rising.

lol did that one Renesas fab with the fire make literally every damn semiconductor in the world that wasn't a CPU or GPU?

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#58

Post by extrapickles »

Gracana wrote: post #38
bluesquared wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my current living nightmare. Endless treadmill of: 1. Our contract manufacturer calls in a panic no longer able to obtain/was shorted on a shipment of part XYZ. XYZ is increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts like MOSFETS, oscillators, to slightly-more-complicated but not "fancy" stuff like serial transceivers, USB stuff, NOR flash, load switches. TI is the bane of my existence currently. 2. Search for a d…

> increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts I can't even get cables anymore. Or connectors. It's an insane situation, and the company I work for isn't built to manage this level of churn in our products. How do you support customers when equipment BOMs change every week? We just can't keep up.

I'm involved with pneumatic connector manufacturing, and we had trouble for awhile getting raw aluminum at any price to make them. At one point we had to buy 3" aluminum bar and use our lathe to turn it down to the size we actually needed (mostly a mix of 2" and 2.5") causing a insane amount of aluminum and time to be wasted (yes the scrap is recycled, but its worth 1/10 of it in bar form). During this it was tempting to tell customers placing orders that if they want their parts faster than 3 months, they need to send us raw aluminum so we can actually make their order.

For some of the other "jelly bean" parts we need (o-rings, snap rings, etc) we are looking at making them in-house, but both the raw materials and machinery to make them are not possible to get. We could spend the next few months making our own machines to fabricate them, but without being able to source steel and various rubbers any more reliably than the finished goods, there isn't much point.

At this point, its tempting to try and raise capital to start mining and smelting aluminum, steel and buy an oil well and small refinery so we can ensure we have the materials needed to keep production smooth.

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#59

Post by tomn »

blueflow wrote: post #52
tomn wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a video of a circuit I made which flashes an LED, using only power collected by the LED: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BM7VDOoFIWI The LED is the component on the left; there's a very dim flash (pretty much just the black die turning red) at around 11s, then every few seconds. I can't remember exactly how it works... I think there's two capacitors charged up to the voltage of the LED in parallel through high-val…

Now this is the most impressive thing i've seen today! Especially because its made out of discrete components. Kudos.

Thanks! I'm not sure what integrated components you could use for this, as anything useful would probably use more current than the LED can provide.

Re: Semiconductors are more than just processors and GPUs

#60

Post by swamp40 »

bluesquared wrote: post #55
swamp40 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your OODA loop is way too long. We buy ALL the parts immediately, within 10 minutes of finding something. If they don't work, it's a loss. On new designs, I find a part in stock, we order ALL we need for the next year, and THEN I make a footprint and put it in the design. For EVERY SINGLE PART. Starting with the IC's. It actually works quite nicely once you get used to it. Obviously, there are some losses there too -…

Wish my slow corporate behemoth would support this, but they are the opposite of agile. It's also gotten to the point where there doesn't exist enough stock in distribution to buy a year's worth. And I'm not talking high volume, maybe 1k/year to 50k/year. Distributors are constantly decommitting from orders, broker stock is drying up, etc

It is surprising how easily companies will fund this change in buying habits when the entire company's existence depends on it. The CEO needs to have a come-to-Jesus moment though.

We've spent several hundred thousand at "Win Source" broker in China, and haven't had a problem yet (knock on wood). We X-ray and test to verify though.

Mostly, Chinese brokers are a den of thieves/a pool of sharks. If they can counterfeit it, they do. Use a credit card to help with clawing your money back in case of fraud. And never ever buy IC's from Amazon or Ebay. Those are ALL fake.

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