How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[SiliconWizard]

I need FPGAs.

[AndyC_772]

Me too. Tried Efinix? There's some in stock @ Digi-key.

[VK3DRB]

LOL: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004207576314.html

At least the shipping for the $4,500 chip is only 45 cents from the broker  . I see LCSC is losing face too by ripping people off.

I am not charging any extra than I normally do, but I am getting quite a bit of work redesigning circuits because of parts shortages. Just replaced a circuit because a key part was nil stock everywhere. I tested the new circuit and it works well. The client bought 10K pieces of the new chip off-the-shelf. The cost is cheaper too... 30 cents each for the new chip compared to $5 broker price for the old chip that is now unobtainable. Almost no firmware changes  .

Despite this, what these chip companies companies don't seen to understand is few former customers are going redesign a board and revert back to their chips if their reputation stinks. Also, once the firmware guy has used a new MCU and its IDE, there is less chance of changing back. They lose forever on that design and maybe future designs. Anyone who has done a related engineering degree will have been taught that vendor reputation is a key criteria for choosing a part.

Next task I have is replacing the PIC18F24/25K40 on a board. Microchip would have been good because of firmware/IDE compatibility, but Microchip is a dead company. TI and STM - no vendor credibility left either. Renensas or Espressif - maybe. Anyway it will be challenge. They use 10K pieces per year and it is cost sensitive. They used a DAC in the PIC chip, but we could use PWM output with an integrator and a voltage follower to generate the analogue output instead.

[Mangozac]

Microchip would have been good because of firmware/IDE compatibility, but Microchip is a dead company. TI and STM - no vendor credibility left either. Renensas or Espressif - maybe.

People keep talking as if there are other MCU manufacturers that are easier to get stock of, but as far as I've seen the situation is the same across all. I see little point in changing because there's no guarantees that you'll fare any better. The best option is to try to find a similar part from the same manufacturer that you might be able to port to with the least aggravation. The supply crunch won't last forever.

[tom66]

In my limited experience I would definitely prefer to have a Microchip part on a board instead of TI/STM.

You can actually get lead times and join the "queue" for backordered parts for them.

I wonder what the statistics are like ... but I know so far we've designed out a fair few TI parts because even if we went to brokers we couldn't get the higher quantities we need for production unless we take lots of broken reels.  That's problematic for quality control, it's okay for prototyping but we don't want to send that out to customers if we can't be sure of the origin.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Oh, what a feeling.

LEAKED: Toyota suspends LandCruiser 70 orders in Australia

[tom66]

Hardly leaked given the press release says that they were going to announce it to the public later that afternoon.

But it's not all that surprising.  You can't recognise the revenue from a 2+ year backlog.  Customers pull out, or their other leases expire and they have to get a vehicle.  It's not a good place to be.

[VK3DRB]

... but I know so far we've designed out a fair few TI parts because even if we went to brokers we couldn't get the higher quantities we need for production...

That is why TI is going to suffer long term. Disgruntled customers are not going to design "back in" TI parts if the company ever gets its act together. TI's website is full of "Notify me when available" . They really need a new CEO and a new approach to how they look after customers and distributors.

[IDEngineer]

LEAKED: Toyota suspends LandCruiser 70 orders in Australia

According to our dealer, we got one of the very last Toyota Sienna Hybrids before they shut down the production line in Indiana. It took us 9+ months to get ours, and corporate won't let dealers even accept new orders. Toyota is so short on IC's that they're making triage-like decisions about their product line. Apparently there are enough sensors and other things in a minivan that they can build several "regular" cars instead. So they'd rather ship more volume, and tick off fewer customers, by allocating what electronics they have to sedans and such. More Corollas and no Siennas, at least for a while.

Our dealer said demand for Siennas is so high that we could pull out of the dealership and immediately sell it for $5-10K more than we paid - no more "lose value when you drive it off the lot". Fortunately we had a contract because I suspect the dealer would have liked to do that very thing to us!

[VK3DRB]

...Our dealer said demand for Siennas is so high that we could pull out of the dealership and immediately sell it for $5-10K more than we paid - no more "lose value when you drive it off the lot".

Same with the Playstation 5. Earlier this year if you got one, you could sell it immediately for double or triple the price. I also hear some car companies are putting in old "analogue" instrument clusters in because they cannot get IC's. (They are not really analogue as pretty much all of them use stepper motors for their dial gauges.)

Texas Instruments has been 'ing to the media that the chip shortage is easing. Go to the TI website. All you will see is their "Notify me when available" on pretty much everything. You won't find much of anything from TI at Digikey.

They say this if you sign up to their notifications: "Sign up for a one-time email notification sent to your myTI email address when there is inventory available. This is a notification and not a reservation for an order. Inventory is subject to change and may not be available even after receiving this notification." This can be translated into one word: "Dunno."

[tom66]

Ref games consoles, the inventory is definitely improving.  In my local stores there's usually a few units left on the shelves.  Is this a good sign?  Depends on whether you think this indicates a reduction in demand or an improvement in supply I guess.  And an improvement to supply for Sony is not the same as one for a SME.

[voltsandjolts]

Texas Instruments has been 'ing to the media that the chip shortage is easing. Go to the TI website. All you will see is their "Notify me when available" on pretty much everything. You won't find much of anything from TI at Digikey.

Yeah. I find that extremely annoying.
The whole TI product line is essentially unavailable to SMEs until next year (maybe), yet the website pretends all is fine and dandy.
No apology, no mention of any issues.
The opposite in fact, 'check out these new ICs' (that you can't buy) and 'sign up for our product emails'. Screw you.
Total refusal to acknowledge a problem and engage with customers for fear of upsetting the stock price.

[T3sl4co1l]

... but I know so far we've designed out a fair few TI parts because even if we went to brokers we couldn't get the higher quantities we need for production...

That is why TI is going to suffer long term. Disgruntled customers are not going to design "back in" TI parts if the company ever gets its act together. TI's website is full of "Notify me when available" . They really need a new CEO and a new approach to how they look after customers and distributors.

I've also found several parts which you discover on their e2e board are "not recommended" and an improved version is urged.  But you'd never know that, looking at the product page.

Tim

[AndyC_772]

No apology, no mention of any issues.
The opposite in fact, 'check out these new ICs' (that you can't buy) and 'sign up for our product emails'

It's just plain weird, isn't it?

The first, last and only thing that anyone in the electronics business really cares about right now is being able to buy parts for designs that are in production. We need them, quite literally, to pay our wages and put food on the table - and yet manufacturers' web sites are all full of the same marketing fluff as usual.

The lack of acknowledgement and engagement is just staggering.

[IDEngineer]

In TI's defense (never thought I'd be typing that phrase!) their notification system does work. We've picked up reels on multiple occasions based on them emailing us.

We have stopped using TI-exclusive products in new designs, though. Just not worth the risk. They're on track to become a "kept company" to a small number of large customers. That's a risky business plan.

[Ranayna]

I think i already mentioned the HPE Aruba Access Points we ordered last year in October.
They finally arrived this week.

A couple of days ago we had a meeting with an HPE Aruba sales rep. If we order the same Access Points today, we can expect a delivery in about a year.

So if there *is* any relief in the supply chains somewhere, that will take a long time to trickle down to actual products.

[Hydrawerk]

This is not exactly a chipageddon, but some cartridges for PACE ADS-200 are now hard to get at least at Farnell.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/newest-pace-ads200-production-station-(a-jbc-killer-at-$239)/msg4332193/#msg4332193
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/newest-pace-ads200-production-station-(a-jbc-killer-at-$239)/msg4340230/#msg4340230

4 cartridges were ordered on 15. 05. 2022 and 3 of them were delivered on 04. 08. 2022. They are OK and working. The 25mm flat blade will be delivered much later probably.

What is going on? Is US Army and NATO buying a lot of PACE products??

[SiliconWizard]

I don't know, but in case people haven't noticed yet, shortages are not just for semiconductors anymore these days.

A lot of stuff including some foods has become nearly unobtainium. And inflation is off the charts. And currencies are shaking. Not really great times.

[floobydust]

Something is going to snap hard. The financial situation in china is even more tension with the property developer, banking and semiconductor "big fund" execs getting investigated. china has spent billions on their semi industry, only to not have the results. It's apparent corruption causes big money leaks over there. We're talking many $100's of billions of dollars 

What chip shortage? TI second quarter 2022 financial results revenue $5.21B, up 14%. Looks like an all time high.
As I say, "money fallin' from the sky yet chips are in short supply" is non sequitur with this "shortage" narrative. They're just going to select big fish.

Chipmakers like TI are entirely about profit and return to shareholders. And notifying customers "no chips for you, small fish".
I don't think engineers boycotting asshole semiconductor manufacturers will make a dent in their bottom line or change their ethics. Yeah keep pounding out silicon for cars and phones.

Wall Street's greed needs to end. It just destroys companies, industries. Imagine an ocean with only sharks swimming around...
edit: forgot stock price

[IDEngineer]

I don't know, but in case people haven't noticed yet, shortages are not just for semiconductors anymore these days.

It's not just semiconductors, it's not even just electronics in general. As I believe I've mentioned here, we have a brand new project that is a full two years late to production because it involves hydraulics and the hydraulics industry imploded in early 2020 much like the automobile industry did. When we started this project I nearly choked on their industry-standard leadtimes of 6-8 weeks, since I was used to getting basically any electronic component in a matter of days (ah, those were the days). But by late 2020 the quotes from the hydraulics industry, for everyday things like pumps and motors, was (verbatim quote) "26 weeks and no promises". It's since extended to 30+ weeks on some things.

That's six to seven months. A full two quarters.

In the case of hydraulics, the problem reaches all the way back to the metal foundries. The hydraulic component manufacturers believed the same as the auto makers, that sales would plummet, so they cancelled orders with their casting vendors (who make the basic housings for things like pumps and motors). In their turn, the casting houses cancelled upstream orders for raw metal from the foundries. Well, just like an IC foundry, the metal foundries can't just sit idle so they found customers to consume this newly-available supply... and then the hydraulics folks saw sales level to INcreasing so they screamed "Wait, wait, we didn't really mean it when we cancelled all those contracts". But the damage was done, the foundry output was booked, and here we sit. Eerily familiar to what happened in IC's, eh?

So yeah, this is not just an electronics thing. Entire industries are having the same problems. No one I know has a forecast for when it will settle down.

[tom66]

There's a long term labour shortage, Covid just accelerated the retirement of people (plus made a lot of people long-term sick and of course killed a fair number too).  Some recruiters are reporting positions going unfilled for 6+ months.  This is combined with roughly similar labour demand as to pre-pandemic. 

There isn't really much of a way out of a problem like this, short of a recession.  If there is a recession (so far I'd say it's 50/50) then it will probably be a shallow recession (oscillating around the zero point for growth for a few quarters) and that could cool demand and allow some inventory to return, but it may well just get worse again.

Long term the only way it's getting fixed is improving productivity with the labour we have and Western countries have historically been crap at doing that, plus any further automation in jobs will almost certainly be seen to be "taking jobs away from hardworking families" etc. so it's political poison.

[IDEngineer]

There isn't really much of a way out of a problem like this, short of a recession.

A recession isn't really a "way out". A recession is like an amputation... you didn't correct the root problem, you just reduced demand on the body's resources to a new point of equilibrium. But, you know, there's that whole missing limb thing.

any further automation in jobs will almost certainly be seen to be "taking jobs away from hardworking families" etc. so it's political poison.

That's how some politicians spin it, yes. But automation is inevitable on basically every level. Already we have technologies that cannot be done manually (IC fabrication is a great example), growth in such industries has been and will be based on automation with only a modest increase in human employment. EV's will eventually reduce blue-collar employment from the factory to the small-town garage because EV's have fewer individual components and simply don't require the same amount of maintenance. That's a GOOD thing for countless reasons, but the bottom line is fewer jobs for an increasing population. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader as to the "proper" response for that inevitable change in our socio-economic structure.

[Kasper]

Bank of England just forecast a deep recession.  RBC, Canada's biggest bank recently forecast a 12% decline in national benchmark home price.

I think these people are usually optimistic.

Recessions are starting, demand will likely decrease.  Central banks are still pumping up their intetest rates.  I think they want to get them up asap so they have room to drop them once recessions hit.

This could lead to people buying phones  computers, tvs, etc less often.  Which of course could lead to a massive reduction in demand for components.

I highly recommend Steve Saretsky's channel on youtube. That's where I get half this info.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Bank of England just forecast a deep recession.  RBC, Canada's biggest bank recently forecast a 12% decline in national benchmark home price.

I think these people are usually optimistic.

Recessions are starting, demand will likely decrease.  Central banks are still pumping up their intetest rates.  I think they want to get them up asap so they have room to drop them once recessions hit.

This could lead to people buying phones  computers, tvs, etc less often.  Which of course could lead to a massive reduction in demand for components.

I highly recommend Steve Saretsky's channel on youtube. That's where I get half this info.

Of course, it's possible that these hair-on-fire muppets could be wrong. It would be a shame to see people squander their happiness and lives by sitting still and clutching their pearls.

[Kasper]

Bank of England just forecast a deep recession.  RBC, Canada's biggest bank recently forecast a 12% decline in national benchmark home price.

I think these people are usually optimistic.

Recessions are starting, demand will likely decrease.  Central banks are still pumping up their intetest rates.  I think they want to get them up asap so they have room to drop them once recessions hit.

This could lead to people buying phones  computers, tvs, etc less often.  Which of course could lead to a massive reduction in demand for components.

I highly recommend Steve Saretsky's channel on youtube. That's where I get half this info.

Of course, it's possible that these hair-on-fire muppets could be wrong. It would be a shame to see people squander their happiness and lives by sitting still and clutching their pearls.

I'd rather clutch too many pearls than take on too many mortgages.

They are often wrong and usually delayed.  A couple years ago bank of Canada was saying interest rates would be very low for a very long time, near zero to end of 2023.  Now they have raised rates at record pace, long after inflation took off.