[sdiy] this chip shortage thing is crazy...

[synth1 at airmail.net]

The wafer fab process uses millions of gallons of water a week. The main water storage for the Taiwan fabs is below 5% left

Paul S.


-----Original Message-----
From: Didier Leplae <didierleplae at yahoo.com> 
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2021 11:14 AM
To: synth1 at airmail.net
Cc: MTG <grant at musictechnologiesgroup.com>; Synth-diy at synth-diy.org
Subject: Re: [sdiy] this chip shortage thing is crazy...

I curious to know, how does the rain (or lack thereof) impact chip production?

> On May 21, 2021, at 9:10 AM, synth1 at airmail.net wrote:
> 
> Be glad to (and my last job was at Microchip in the PIC24 group).
> 
> 1) the shortage is real. And if the rains do not come soon to Taiwan 
> (in their worse drought in years) it's going to get REALLY BAD.
> 
> 2) the shortage is due to Covid. Orders for all of 2020 were off in 
> the first 3 quarters. This means the 5 major silicon wafer suppliers, 
> who build to forecast, cut back production. Fabless companies like 
> Microchip (well, MOSTLY fabless) buy wafers on a 4 month forecast.
> 
> 3) then 3 things happened all in a short time period.
> a) there were 4 major fabs that had fires
> b) people got bored...REALLY bored. And Zoom/Teams required a GIANT 
> spike in laptop demand. Bored people buy stuff.
> c) the car companies started seeing demand in Q4 because bored people, 
> even though DRIVING WAS MINIMAL, upgraded their cars. BECAUSE BORED.
> 
> 4) so starting October 2021, the wafer forecasts TRIPLED. Well, you 
> can't make a baby in 1 month by making 9 women pregnant.
> 
> 5) then it turned out that where the ICs are packaged (ie wafers going 
> into the IC packages) is mainly Thailand and Malaysia, which were 
> ravaged by Covid and sorta covering it up and they had problems 
> getting people into the factories to operate the die-bonding machines.
> 
> 6) Lastly, here comes THE PANIC. And not talking you sweating over a 
> Mouser order. I'm talking panic by people needing 100million parts A DAY.
> And they started doing this:
> 
> a) triple-ordering, because cancelling a back-order is usually free. 
> So, let's say you need 10,000 parts. You place orders with 3 different 
> suppliers, all for say 20,000 and then as parts arrive, you simply 
> cancel what you don't need.
> b) buying supply out to next year. The big runners (like Apple) only 
> buy out
> 1 quarter. But in THIS panic, you get what is called 'blankets', which 
> are long-term POs (like 1-2 years) where the price is 'locked in' if 
> the buyer takes the order and CANNOT CANCEL. And I heard from very 
> reliable sources this is what companies like Cisco, Peloton, and Tesla 
> started doing WHICH THEY **NEVER** DO. I heard AWS (Amazon's Cloud 
> division) that designs their own HW bought 90% of all the Samsung 
> Flash memory allocation for 2021.
> c) and this is my favorite: shipping container capacity. Companies 
> with DEEP pockets then went out and bought literally every shipping 
> container AND THE SPOT ON THE BOAT for like 18 MONTHS.
> So, companies that could manufacture and get parts to the dock had NO 
> WHERE TO GO. Except on a plane. Which is not factored in the selling 
> contract price.
> 
> Again: for a lots of semis, especially ANY microcontrollers from 
> ANYONE, if it does not rain a shit-ton in June in Taiwan, kiss it 
> goodbye for a FULL YEAR.
> 
> Paul S.
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Synth-diy <synth-diy-bounces at synth-diy.org> On Behalf Of MTG
> Sent: Friday, May 21, 2021 8:20 AM
> To: synth-diy at synth-diy.org
> Subject: Re: [sdiy] this chip shortage thing is crazy...
> 
> No one is commenting on the actual shortage? I don't see any micros 
> I'm interested in with availability this year.
> 
>> On 5/21/2021 3:45 AM, Roman Sowa wrote:
>> Today I have received one of my orders from Microchip placed in March.
>> One part number, but I got it in 9 bags! Each contains chips from 
>> different batch with different traceability code so I can understand 
>> why they are separate, but it's still crazy. The bags contain between
>> 7 to 180 chips. And those are full size 50x20 bags to fit regular 
>> tubes. Imagine seven SSOP20 chips in a big bag.
>> Looks like they swiped the floor in every warehouse to find them...
>> 
>> It was also great fun to watch them change scheduled shippment date. 
>> At the time of ordering they were in stock, so yes, I took them all. 
>> Next they've sent me like 10 emails changing delivery date all over 
>> the place between April 2021 and August 2022.
>> But I finally got them, yay!
>> Still a couple more orders expected anytime between tomorrow and 
>> summer 2022.
>> 
>> Roman
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