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Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

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Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#61

Post by NelsonMinar »

Fiahil wrote: post #56
NelsonMinar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so sorry you've gone through this, that sounds miserable. When you feel up for it I hope you can seek treatment again. For context for other readers: the cost of one of these machines is about $800. That's a very small amount of money, often less than a single month's insurance premium. And for that the insurance companies turn medical treatment devices into anxiety-inducing spy machines. It's hideous.

> 800 […] That's a very small amount of money, often less than a single month's insurance premium. Jesus fucking christ, what the fuck ?! How much does health insurance cost in the US ?

Prices vary widely and many Americans have no idea because their employer pays it.

You can shop California's market yourself; try 94114 for San Francisco. https://www.coveredca.com/

For a 30 year old it's $400 to $1100 a month depending on coverage level. A mediocre "Silver" plan is $400 at age 20 to $1060 at age 65, at which point you qualify for nationalized healthcare.

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#62

Post by Arcanum-XIII »

itsoktocry wrote: post #9
xani_ wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the pretty vanilla chip I waited year for last year is now only on 48 weeks lead time... The other a bit less common one is only few months tho, compared to year+ so I guess it slowly is. Inflation probably helped too

> only on 48 weeks lead time... Small end-users receiving chips is a lagging indicator of the state of the supply chain. Companies are already warning about surplus inventory, ie: https://moneyweek.com/economy/global-economy/605232/semicond...

Honestly, it depends on the kind of component. It's easier to get CPU that support android than more lambda one for example, and that's without speaking about sub component. This lead to strange situations to say the least (partial bom delivery for example, so no power, no ethernet, 2G instead of 3G/4G modem...).

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#63

Post by cagataygurturk »

hackernewds wrote: post #33
bluesquared wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've commented on this before on HN. I have sleep apnea and a ResMed CPAP. A very US-centric response: Insurance also seems to have access to this data in one way or another (not sure if direct with ResMed or via your doctor). If you don't hit your "compliance target" for treatment, insurance will cease paying 'their share' of the cost. So I found myself in a downward spiral of 0. Struggling to sleep with sleep apnea…

As someone who couldn't hit compliance either, any other sleep apnea solutions that have worked for you (or others?) (apologies about derailing into subthread)

Here in Germany, "Mandibular advancement splint"[1] is a popular device recommended by doctors for less severe apnea cases. I was diagnosed with a light apnea and now I am getting this device as my test results showed that a CPAP treatment would be overkill but this could help. I am afraid I can't share more experiences as I am waiting the device to be prepared after 2 hours of dentist visit where they took some measurements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandibular_advancement_splint

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#64

Post by missedthecue »

Fiahil wrote: post #56
NelsonMinar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so sorry you've gone through this, that sounds miserable. When you feel up for it I hope you can seek treatment again. For context for other readers: the cost of one of these machines is about $800. That's a very small amount of money, often less than a single month's insurance premium. And for that the insurance companies turn medical treatment devices into anxiety-inducing spy machines. It's hideous.

> 800 […] That's a very small amount of money, often less than a single month's insurance premium. Jesus fucking christ, what the fuck ?! How much does health insurance cost in the US ?

Is this really the first time on the internet that you've encountered a discussion about US healthcare costs?

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#65

Post by londons_explore »

hpkuarg wrote: post #22
londons_explore wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one reason I think most contracts for goods for future delivery should be public knowledge. Ie. "Mr Smith purchased 68 tons of steel for delivery in New York June next year for $200k". Then anyone wanting those same goods and willing to pay more can contact Mr Smith and make an offer to buy the contract. I believe such a system would make the economy substantially more efficient, at the cost of privacy. More…

Why would anybody want to trade with Mr. Smith's contract in particular when a market for the contract still exists, with market makers and other participants providing bids and offers that is better what Mr. Smith can do? At least, assuming you are talking about a regulated commodities futures contracts like those which trade on the CME.

If most buyers buy ahead like Mr Smith, then the liquidity in the spot market can dry up, especially in times of supply constraint.

Mr Smith and many people like him might happily sell on his steel for 10x the price he paid for it to someone desperate for some steel.

Yet, as things stand now, whenever there is severe market disruption, you frequently find goods aren't available for any price. Thats simply because Mr Smith and people like him continue to take delivery of the steel he ordered 6 months ago, and doesn't actually need right now, because he isn't aware of the guy down the street who really reeds it right away and will pay a lot.

If all goods are always 'for sale', then goods can be allocated efficiently to whoever needs them most.

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#66

Post by londons_explore »

axiolite wrote: post #42
londons_explore wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> buying up the chips at a premium (i.e. above the washing machine cost). Industries often act illogically in cases like this. You see it with many types of goods ordered a long time in advance. If there is a sudden shortage, the people who have ordered their raw materials a long time in advance (who have effectively purchased a future for that commodity) think they made a good move and see it as a business advantage…

> the futures market should never determine if a factory is operating But what about washing machine futures ? Or more realistically, how much is shutting down the factory going to cost the washing machine manufacturer in terms of employee compensation, lost employees (more hiring and training), washing machine brand losses in the market, failure to deliver on existing contracts, and similar? They can't claim force m…

True... but that has to be compared with those same set of losses the car factory up the street will suffer if they don't get the chips...

If there is only enough chips for one factory to run, someone has to shutdown and take those losses. And the shutdown factory should be the one with less to lose, not the one who didn't buy futures in time.

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#68

Post by segfaultbuserr »

bheadmaster wrote: post #41

So many smartphones are thrown away in the trash each year. How many chips can be scavenged from them? Perhaps chip shortage will finally put an end to the planned obsolesce of the smartphone industry, and bring some kind of stability to the whole thing.

> So many smartphones are thrown away in the trash each year. How many chips can be scavenged from them?

Zero!? As far as I know, chips are inherently disposable products, recyling chips is almost an impossibility in modern electronics due to reliability problems. Nearly all chip datasheets contain the warning: DO NOT solder more than twice, which is the number of passes it takes to reflow-solder the front and back side of the PCB. And even this is only possible under carefully controlled reflow oven temperature profile, the max time interval during peak temperature should be less than 10 seconds. Any extra soldering steps or heat voids all warranty, since it exposes the chip under additional thermal stresses, and may damage the chip or degrade its long-term reliability. To recycle a chip, it takes two additional passes, first to remove it from the motherboard, next to re-tin or re-ball the chips, finally to install it on new boards, by now the chip would've experienced 6 thermal-stress events.

Consider the fact that modern surface-mount technology has progressed to a point when even reliably assembling circuit boards using brand-new chips can be technically challenging for high yield - in mass production, it takes lots of tweakings, such as solder stencil opening, solder alloy selections, solderability test of the tinning on components, reflow oven temperature profile, inert gas protection, X-ray inspection, and even Scanning Electron Microscopes to perform metallurgical analysis for troubleshooting - I fail to see how recycling is ever going to work. It adds a huge number of additional uncertainties.

Sure, repair shops and R&D labs do it all the time, and it works at a small scale. But reliably doing it at an industrial scale will be extremely problematic. This is why even a functional "counterfeit" chip (salvaged and remarked) is a great cause of concern, these components have been heavily abused, and nobody should ever trust it in a piece of critical equipment. Are you going to trust your life on a car when the microcontroller chip in the ECU is a salvaged part? Or pay $700 for a smartphone if a chip has a time-to-failure of who-knows-how-long hours?

Even back in the 80s when all the chips were through-hole components, the reliability of reused components was already a problem. In the days of QFN, BGA, LGA, CSP and WLP chips, I don't see any solution at all. This is the dark side of the semiconductor industry - nearly all chips are disposable.

Nevertheless, this is a one-sided perspective from circuit board assemblers, which is what I'm familiar with. I don't know anything about electronics recycling. Thus, if there's any progress and innovation in the field of recycling, I'd love to know. Perhaps the manufacturers are overcautious on reliability and it's not really that bad?

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#69

Post by kennywinker »

honkycat wrote: post #50

I follow news from the boutique modular synthesizer space, and it has been a BLOODBATH lately. The legendary OP-1 was recently discontinued. Prices are going through the roof. Multiple popular modular synth companies have closed up shop recently due to the chip shortage. What can I say, it sucks!

The OP-1 is a bad example. It was discontinued because they replaced it with the OP-1 field - essentially the same thing but with a few feature tweaks.

But the bloodbath is real. Companies are shutting down (WMD, synthesizers.com), delaying or killing products (bastl, dirtywave, behringer), and raising prices (moog).

For the sake of the little guys who can't weather the storm much longer, I really hope this lets up asap!

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2022/07/12/supply-chain-i...

Re: Companies are hacking their way around the chip shortage

#70

Post by walrus01 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #13

Starlink provides a router with their ISP package. For the last year the router comes without an ethernet port. Wireless only. They've never said why but I assume it's because of a chip shortage. (There is an add-on for ethernet you can order for a modest price.) ResMed started selling a version of their popular AirSense 10 AutoSet sleep apnea machine without a cellular modem. Normally the product uploads treatment d…

there is no shortage of 1000BaseT PHY and ethernet chips or you would see absolute chaos in the market of $50 to $150 home/small office routers and ethernet switches. The sort of all-in-one CPU/RAM/ethernet chip that's built into a small router like the starlink one already implements ethernet it just needs the PHY to do it

If mikrotik and ubiquiti can still source the chips to build $50 routers, which is the case, there is no extreme shortage that spacex could not handle through its own ability to find manufacturers and vendors.

The starlink v2 terminal coming with a weird proprietary copper cable interface and wifi-only-to-clients is for entirely other weird spacex related reasons.

edit: here is a photo of the starlink proprietary-connector-to-1000BaseT adapter, there is not a whole lot going on here.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/rxoz16/gen_3_ethe...

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