'flash microchip' shortage...?

[Byron G. Jacquot]

>> Out of curiosity, anyone got any thoughts as to what device this could
>> actually be? One of the AVR flash programmeable mpu's possibly?
>yes, its one of them, though I dont know which.
>To cope with the several million part quantity that sony and a couple of
>mobile phone
>companies wanted (G3 phones) they stopped maeking their normal lines and
>started
>producing these things..

My undersatanding is also that some of the folks who are set up to fab flash
parts have been making plain flash chips (address lines in, data lines out),
rather than their flash microprocessors because the demand has been very
high...which means that the supplies of the flash processors is falling behind.

>From what I've seen, there was a bit of a flash microprocessoir panic maybe
9 months ago, and a lot of "cowboy" brokers specualted on the early supply
problems, and bought a lot of parts (cutting off some of the then-available
supply, and just exacerbating the shortage!).  From what I can tell, this
was driven by a couple of very specific parts (maybe the surfave mount
versions of the smaller AVRs, like the 1200), but the panic reached out to
encompass a lot of other parts as well.

Today, a lot of it is back to normal...I've found that the mid-sized AVRs
are now more available then they were a year ago...

And one of those "children's toys" is likely the new playstation!

>> Apparently the mystery IC manufacturer is limiting quantities to 'keep the
>> prices up'.

>Nope, they're not doing this..
>they just couldnt cope with the demand..
>They've since bought 1( maybe two) more fab plants
>and stocks are slowly returning to normal.. supposdly by Q3 next year life
>will be aback to normal..

I think the "limiting quantities" story might be the sort of this that drove
the flash micro panic.  Unless you need huge quantities of either plain
flash memory, or one of the few AVRs, you'll probably not notice too great a
gap in what you can get.

Byron Jacquot