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The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

cnbc.com

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Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#681

Post by HumblyTossed »

ineedasername wrote: post #124
bredren wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since 14% of renters are behind on rent and evictions begin June 30, aren’t vehicle repossessions going to kick in July / August? Presumably, due in part to eviction protection, they have been able to divert all or a portion of their rent payments to keeping up with bad car loans for commute vehicles that often will not be needed. These folks need them for housing unfortunately. If repossessed cars start showing up t…

Most new cars still suck / Do not offer meaningful new features That really depends on how old your car is. I generally buy instead of lease, and run the car until it starts having regular problems. As a result, my car is 12 years old, and any new one from the last few years is a significant upgrade in terms of features. I don't really want a monthly car payment again, but I'm almost looking forward to when my curren…

My current car is a little older. I pay a monthly car payment to myself, so when this car gets too expensive to maintain, I'll find a new car that costs what I have in savings and start the cycle again.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#682

Post by avs733 »

p_l wrote: post #630
avs733 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but with a caveat, it's largely a result of BAD just-in-time manufacturing. Zero inventory production systems (ZIPS) are what people often mean when they talk about JIT, they are different. Toyota, one of the originators and leaders of JIT/lean has not had this problem...because they don't blindly ZIPS [0]. Not holding inventory is great for a lot of reasons, but it is a calculated risk...Toyota learned from…

(probably wrongly worded) Wouldn't toyota model essentially set a required buffer size in kanban, essentially ensuring a certain level of stock decided upon by risk management? The pull flow would then ensure that the stock fluctuates around that value instead of being driven to 0, because taking a "card" out of stock might trigger purchasing of more stock?

Toyota (for example) doesn't get the chips directly, this is about visibility/planning/management of your vendor's vendor's vendor's. Those chips (Tier 3+) become boards (Tier 2) become center consoles (Tier 1) that an OEM installs.

The question isn't how stock is tracked or risked, its who is responsible for it.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#683

Post by sumtechguy »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #629
neilv wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The current chip shortage has claimed 6 of our firmware devs, all hired by companies ready to spend just any money for anybody "who can replace that ____ing STM|NXP|Renesas thing" Condolences on the loss of coworkers. But this seems interesting to software people who haven't been doing embedded, but who can wrangle C well enough to adapt (quickly?) to embedded constraints and interfaces.

Embedded development is more than just wrangling C, that would be like saying backend dev is wrangling EC2 instances ;). It's knowing how low level hardware operates and knowing how to dig yourself out of the various gotchas like for example figuring out that a last minute replacement of the crystal oscillator by the HW team with a cheaper one is now screwing up your boot process or that the reason your products are…

Even just making software for those things can be interesting. You need to know how the memory is laid out. You need to know if an interrupt happens at the wrong spot you are broken. I had one where the data was bumping through a 485 bus and the data was coming out wonky on the other side. Meaning I had 0 control over the software or hw on the other side as it was a vendor product. But I could at least read the chips numbers and guess what the dev did with the memory segments on the other side. Turns out I was telling the thing to read over a memory boundary which caused odd results. Which lead me to breaking the command into 2 parts.

Sometimes being an embedded dev is dead easy. Other times you are dealing with a GCC chain from 2003. 2 layers of some 3rd party of libs that someone bought in 2005 because the VP was good friends with a buddy in some other company that made something similar (which you may may not have the code for). With 64k of flash and RAM. And the vendor ground off the chip numbers and put their own sticker in place. Playing detective, historian, and making good guesses as you may not even have access to the firmware anymore. Then on top of that sometimes you are really lucky and have a debug port and can play the printf logging game to see what is going wrong.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#684

Post by rajacombinator »

CRConrad wrote: post #643
rajacombinator wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could happen to Taiwan? I’m interested.

Invasion by the PRC seems the most plausible threat. So obvious, in fact, that I'm wondering why you ask.

Because everything I’ve read indicates that scenario is not in fact plausible. I’m wondering what the more likely but potentially equivalent alternatives are.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#685

Post by throwaway0a5e »

frogpelt wrote: post #612
qubidt wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern trucks are still huge relative to other vehicles on the road. I want smaller trucks.

Small trucks are available. A base model, 2wd, 2-door Tacoma is not big.

It's comparable to the Dodge Dakota. And the Dakota was supposed to be larger than the compact trucks.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#686

Post by throwaway0a5e »

look_lookatme wrote: post #621
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yeah, the size of these trucks has completely put me off ever wanting one. I miss the small ones from a few decades ago. You (statistical you as a HN user, not you personally) say this with one breath but one look at the B pillar of an 80s minivan and you'd start coming up with excuses for why it's not safe enough for your kid. The same demographics that complain about cars growing do a hell of a lot more complainin…

Not to mention that a full sized F150 is less than an inch wider than one from 25 years ago. What people see when they see truck size is vertical size and hood lines which is what has changed the most. Trucks look much bigger now, which is partly aesthetics and partly for safety, but I think people have internalized a belief that they have grown outward too, which is not the case.

The small trucks that the HN demographics tend to err toward have grown substantially.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#687

Post by varjag »

KirillPanov wrote: post #654
varjag wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-spinning a board, LOL. Dude, there's copper substrate shortage on the market, people have delays getting their already ordered PCBs delivered.

> there's copper substrate shortage on the market, people have delays getting their already ordered PCBs delivered. Any details on this? Media/tradejournal links? I wouldn't have believed you six months ago, but hey, everything's changed. Still, copper-clad board shortages... I mean if that really is for real we're headed back to the stone age real quick. I hope it's just a rumor.

Very much everyone in the business is aware of it since winter.

but sure

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/crisis-printed-circuit-board-...

https://elmatica.com/portfolio/copper-foil-shortage-persists...

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#688

Post by jrwoodruff »

neltnerb wrote: post #410
baybal2 wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get that this is a potential big problem, but I had to stop reading when the dog washing company blamed needing to respin a new board on a chip being out of stock due to this. What you are suggesting is quite impractical, unless you are a really big business with cash, which can simply direct order components. Small businesses, even in Shenzhen, a place inundated with supply chain abundance, always have to either…

I agree and have experienced that too. Even without obsoleted parts, stuff will be impossible to find all the sudden, particularly specialty components. Heck, I've had vendors who simply had fabs that caught fire... but I always have a laundry list of substitutes that are pin compatible when humanly possible, which is for almost all the parts on the board. For the ones that aren't possible, that's a much smaller BOM…

I'm sure the dog washing business wasn't trying to be a poster child, more likely it was the one business that the reporter could find on deadline that wasn't a huge manufacturer, was impacted, and was willing to talk about it. More like a bit of color to show the breadth of the problem - this isn't just GM and Apple or whoever in a lurch.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#689

Post by joezydeco »

kingsuper20 wrote: post #577
baybal2 wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're popular because they're pretty decent, low cost, have good dev boards and offer a wide variety of parts. Now find a single person who can program bare hardware on a short notice on above Arduino level. The current chip shortage has claimed 6 of our firmware devs, all hired by companies ready to spend just any money for anybody "who can replace that ____ing STM|NXP|Renesas thing" People downstream in the ind…

>Now find a single person who can program bare hardware on a short notice on above Arduino level. Wait, there's real money in that? Maybe I shouldn't waste my time just doing yard work. Sidenote: I just asked my wife about parts shortages at her workplace. Evidently you guys are right. I should get out more.

No, there isn't real money in this. I've been doing it 30 years now and my earnings curve will never match what a webdev gets.

Firmware engineers are the out-of-sight-out-of-mind component in the product development spectrum.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#690

Post by dcolkitt »

amelius wrote: post #427
jfoutz wrote: post #120

I think a lot of folks underestimate how fabulously complicated it is to fab a chip. Yes, you can diy it in your garage, here's a wonderful implementation. http://sam.zeloof.xyz/first-ic/ But take a look at the specialized tools they used. Heck, think about proper handling of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrofluoric_acid and this is just a simple amp. imagine trying to make something with lots of gates? Making a si…

If making a chip is so hard, then why do the FAANG companies own this world, not e.g. TSMC or Samsung?

One reason I'd say is because there's an at best weak relationship between "hard" and "well-paid".

Coca Cola has a larger market cap than Pfizer. mRNA vaccines are definitely a lot harder to make than sugar water. At an individual level sales people are often paid more than the engineers in the org, despite the latter doing much more complex work and having specialized training.

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