How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[msuffidy]

Well not too bad until I have to buy something new.

So far I just picked up a 32GB Kingston Data Traveller G4 for $9.03 Canadian after taxes. I thought it doesn't get cheaper than that. Recently I decided to make a openwrt router into a low power (and silent) overnight downloader for a throttled cell phone. I started with a 8GB flash in a USB port, and then I decided the idea was that I was going to fill it up to make sure I don't keep hitting the same blocks at the start as to wear them out. So there are less rewrite cycles using a 32GB one and you don't have to guesstimate the last session. What I do is log in with SSH and start up a shell script and then disown it from the shell and exit. The stick is shared as a samba share and I edit the script from a proper computer.

[Howardlong]

Remember this?

Other brokers (eg Win-Source) are just taking the piss with bait-and-switch, they advertise at one price, take your money, then tell you "the engineer found problems with that batch, but we still have stock at 2x/3x the price, please send more money" and if you accept, they take your money but won't send you an updated invoice. What's more they take a week to tell you, so holding you up even further. Avoid Win-Source unless you're absolutely desperate: when they finally deliver, the parts are kosher IME.

F***ers.

This time I told them to either ship at the advertised price (that they're still advertising by the way), or immediately refund.

Win-source is seemingly less honourable than most brokers. Brokers know what parts are nil stock world wide. If they know you need them desperately, the dodgy ones will gouge you. By the way, "Allison" is an alias.

A reputable broker in the USA is Commodity Components International in Peabody, MA. I visited them when I was in the US and found them to be very professional. IBM used them as a trusted source so they don't sell dodgy components. The fact that CCI's CEO gave me tickets to a Boston Red Sox/New York Yankees game with one of their managers did not influence my opinion of them . I suggest you contact them for your RF amp chip.

Hint: Do not contact more than a few brokers for high volume parts, because that can create an artificial high demand for scarce parts and the price skyrockets.

By the way, we have a PC parts store near me called Computer and Parts Land, which makes the worst brokers look good. From first hand experience, they have charged more than the advertised price if the part is in high demand (illegal). They also charge a 15% restocking fee if something does not work as advertised (illegal), don't honour warranty (illegal), and do a lot of other dodgy stuff. Entertaining reading from disgruntled former customers...https://www.productreview.com.au/listings/computer-parts-land

Maybe there should be a special review site for component vendors (TI Direct, Microchip Direct, Digikey, Arrow, LCSC, brokers etc). Maybe even EEVBLOG could host this. Just an idea.

There is this: https://www.supplierblacklist.com/blacklisted-suppliers/.

I have a Netcomponents account so I know that the part I was after is widely available despite being EOL. However, Win-Source have an easy way to pay... it's all the bait-and-switch dishonesty around it that makes them somewhere to avoid. This bullshit adds even more unnecessary delays to schedules.

[tszaboo]

I place alternative part footprints, and compatible parts on the PCB. And look for an alternative which is in stock, when they ask me to do so. Otherwise this is what you say to managers:
"What do you want me to do? Give birth to a reel of ICs?"

you can also say buy the god damn part when i tell you to
we are stocking components on our own also because the contractor has to go through a lenghty process. Not good when the part available at a moment is vanished 4 hours later when the approval process has ended

D you have a 4 hour approval process? Good for you. For me its once a week normally. I told them its not going to work, but I'm supposed to "predict the need of parts ahead of time, once a week is perfectly normal". And that's just the approval, then supply chain looks at it whenever they feel like, and order it. I've been waiting for an enclosure for 3 weeks now.

[Tomorokoshi]

Engineering is overscheduled. There is no time left to work on issues like supply and replacements without having other projects and schedules get delayed. Then Management gets all concerned because schedules are slipping. Sales gets frustrated with delayed projects.

Engineering time and projects are tracked in some spreadsheet somewhere. Asynchronous interrupt events like supply problems don't show up in the schedule, so it goes directly to delay in the projects. This is codified on the Engineering side by tracking task work in Jira using Agile or some other mis-applied trendy management method. Every sprint many are scheduled with tasks totaling up to 40 hours. Very few tasks are ever completed in less time than originally scheduled.

The contract manufacturers have some amount of stock. But quantities are random; 5000 piece reels of some resistor, while expensive connectors are bought with little extra. They seem to be either understaffed or overloaded.

[nctnico]

OTOH: where are you going to store a week's worth of goods being shipped in?

In a warehouse, storage room, or other appropriate facility.

And how big is that going to be? Look at the volume that enters a big harbour on a daily basis. Or the sheer volume of materials that a car manufacturing plant needs. Probably these kind of operations need 2 or 3 times the amount of land surface compared to the current situation. The companies I worked for that did some kind of production work had about 2/3th of the floor space dedicated to materials storage already.

[Howardlong]

I place alternative part footprints, and compatible parts on the PCB. And look for an alternative which is in stock, when they ask me to do so. Otherwise this is what you say to managers:
"What do you want me to do? Give birth to a reel of ICs?"

you can also say buy the god damn part when i tell you to
we are stocking components on our own also because the contractor has to go through a lenghty process. Not good when the part available at a moment is vanished 4 hours later when the approval process has ended

D you have a 4 hour approval process? Good for you. For me its once a week normally. I told them its not going to work, but I'm supposed to "predict the need of parts ahead of time, once a week is perfectly normal". And that's just the approval, then supply chain looks at it whenever they feel like, and order it. I've been waiting for an enclosure for 3 weeks now.

One of the benefits of being a one-man-band is that you benefit from a zero hour approval process. Furthermore, putting those orders on your credit card earns serious frequent flyer miles for your vacations... except there's next to nowhere to fly to right now of course.

[james_s]

And how big is that going to be? Look at the volume that enters a big harbour on a daily basis. Or the sheer volume of materials that a car manufacturing plant needs. Probably these kind of operations need 2 or 3 times the amount of land surface compared to the current situation. The companies I worked for that did some kind of production work had about 2/3th of the floor space dedicated to materials storage already.

I don't care. Somehow companies managed this before, this JIT thing is a recent development. If they did it before then it's a solved problem. Electronic components don't have to take up a ton of space.

[Tomorokoshi]

Here is something I wonder about. Does the procurement strategy of electronic components depend on the background of engineering management? Specifically, if there is there a difference if engineering management comes from an Electrical Engineering background compared to Mechanical Engineering.

[E-Design]

Here is something I wonder about. Does the procurement strategy of electronic components depend on the background of engineering management? Specifically, if there is there a difference if engineering management comes from an Electrical Engineering background compared to Mechanical Engineering.

Im my company, it makes no difference what-so-ever. We have procurement policies in place on when to buy and how much based on production demand and projections. It matters not what your background is, who you are, where you came from or the color of socks you have on that day - the policy is more or less followed.

[Siwastaja]

How the fuck are we supposed to design anything when parts simply vanish overnight without warning?!

Repeat after me:
"This is some else's problem."
Say it every day 3x while looking into the mirror in the morning.

I place alternative part footprints, and compatible parts on the PCB. And look for an alternative which is in stock, when they ask me to do so. Otherwise this is what you say to managers:
"What do you want me to do? Give birth to a reel of ICs?"

This is good advice.

Do your best. Communicate clearly about the situation. There's nothing else you can do and if someone can't deal with that, you deserve something better.

[tom66]

We designed a board with TPS62140, TPS25942A and TPS63060 in it;  in Feb 2021, these parts were in good supply, no stock issues,  every major distributor had 2000+ pcs on hand.

Come to order the boards today and we can't get any of those parts. Ended up respinning with MPS, LT and Maxim parts.  I honestly did not think I would ever design in a Maxim part deliberately (long story as to why but they had supply issues before.)  The world has gone crazy for semiconductors.

Talking to my half-brother today and he was buying up as many hard drives as he could get his hands on as Chia mining is something he's doing, he has over 500TB and counting - apparently you can't buy any 8TB or 14TB drives any more and it's getting progressively harder to buy 4TB disks.  So if you were enjoying cheap hard disks then that's coming to an end now, just like other crypto made GPU prices insane.

[nctnico]

Talking to my half-brother today and he was buying up as many hard drives as he could get his hands on as Chia mining is something he's doing, he has over 500TB and counting - apparently you can't buy any 8TB or 14TB drives any more and it's getting progressively harder to buy 4TB disks.  So if you were enjoying cheap hard disks then that's coming to an end now, just like other crypto made GPU prices insane.

Is there no end to this cryptocurrency stupidity?  Cryptocurrency should be banned for environmental reasons.

[NiHaoMike]

Is there no end to this cryptocurrency stupidity?  Cryptocurrency should be banned for environmental reasons.

No reason to ban it in general, maybe just the inefficient ones. Perhaps someone will eventually come up with a cryptocurrency that's efficient and stays that way. So far, I have been mining Swagbucks for 5 years and it's still profitable, but it has so many other problems that I would say the energy efficient mining is the only thing good about it.

Then there's Helium which is a cryptocurrency that's "mined" by providing IoT connectivity using LoRa, but the organization behind it is greedy and insists on you buying their overpriced radios to mine with. It really could have been a great idea if they stayed open and honest.

[VK3DRB]

Is there no end to this cryptocurrency stupidity?  Cryptocurrency should be banned for environmental reasons.

No reason to ban it in general, maybe just the inefficient ones. Perhaps someone will eventually come up with a cryptocurrency that's efficient and stays that way. ..

Already is. Its called Chia coin, which uses much less energy. It uses a lot of hard disk space rather than CPU crunching power. If this gets big, SSD's will be in short supply. Some SSD manufacturers are voiding warranty if SSD's are used to mine coins.

[IDEngineer]

Guaranteed someone will find a way to hate it. No matter what you do, someone is offended. That old song was right: "You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself".

It appears the "take offense" crowd has overplayed their hand. Fewer and fewer people are paying attention anymore.

[NiHaoMike]

Already is. Its called Chia coin, which uses much less energy. It uses a lot of hard disk space rather than CPU crunching power. If this gets big, SSD's will be in short supply. Some SSD manufacturers are voiding warranty if SSD's are used to mine coins.

It's a bit early to say if it will remain efficient or even profitable for long. Besides, if it's anything like Burstcoin (which I mined back in the day), it ends up getting similar energy efficiency to mining (other) altcoins with cheap smartphones but the initial hardware cost is much higher. For reference, my Swagbucks miner is currently making about $10/month while using about 3W. Swagbucks mining is limited by IP addresses (specifically residential IPs in the US and a few other countries) although how they enforce that brings a lot of drawbacks.

Luckily, it was the cheap ($5-10 each) smartphones that had the best performance per dollar figure for mining back then, the good smartphones simply cost too much to make them worth buying for mining. (A possible exception might be Note 7 or rather the motherboards from them.) Thus, if those altcoins caused a shortage of any kind, it was of the really cheap smartphones that weren't very good as smartphones, and some would even say that reducing the supply of smartphones for young kids is a good thing.

[james_s]

Cryptocurrency is just idiotic any way you slice it. The only reason it's "worth" anything is because it is in limited supply and relies on some finite resource to mine it, whether that be electricity or GPUs or hard drives. It has become a massive environmental problem, consuming enormous amounts of energy and creating many tons of waste from all the hardware that is used just doing useless busy work, and it drives up prices on commodities that people could do something useful with.

It would really make my day if somebody found a way to crack it or some other event occurred that made the entire cryptocurrency economy collapse and implode and all of it become worthless. Making it a crime to mine it would be difficult to enforce but I would support that 100%. Some day people are going to look back on that fad and shake their head and the enormous amount of resources that went into producing worthless sequences of numbers.

[nctnico]

Is there no end to this cryptocurrency stupidity?  Cryptocurrency should be banned for environmental reasons.

No reason to ban it in general, maybe just the inefficient ones. Perhaps someone will eventually come up with a cryptocurrency that's efficient and stays that way.

There is every reason to ban it. Whether it is hard drives or electricity, good resources go to waste (in a time where we should be moving to sustainable ways of life anyway and even worse in times of component shortages) on 'currency' which is fundamentally flawed because it is based on something which is rare. Please study the reasons behind the regular currencies no longer being backed by gold or other precious metals. The very short explaination is: because it is not workable for today's economy. Which in turn means cryptocurrencies that need to be mined are a dead end; they will never replace regular currencies.

[NiHaoMike]

Cryptocurrency is just idiotic any way you slice it. The only reason it's "worth" anything is because it is in limited supply and relies on some finite resource to mine it, whether that be electricity or GPUs or hard drives. It has become a massive environmental problem, consuming enormous amounts of energy and creating many tons of waste from all the hardware that is used just doing useless busy work, and it drives up prices on commodities that people could do something useful with.

IPv4 addresses are finite, but using one for Swagbucks mining does not interfere with other uses for that address. Likewise, although bandwidth (for a given link) is finite, it's not really something that can be conserved or stored for use at a later time. Helium is an altcoin mined by hosting LoRa hotspots, which is great as a concept but the greedy creators ruined the implementation. (Time for some not so greedy creator to make an alternative based on hosting Wifi hotspots that are backed by something like Tor, I2P, or VPN services?)

Then there are altcoins like Curecoin and Foldingcoin that use medical research as the work in mining. Those solve the energy use problem in a different way by making the work useful.

I suppose we could get rid of the term "mining" along with the negative reputation it has collected and call it the problem of "I have this hardware that I want to use to make some money with by just having it running." Additionally, "In doing so, I want it to either use a negligible amount more energy than it did before or do something useful with the energy besides making money." In that way, I suspect storage mined altcoins like Chia and Burstcoin are great for cloud storage companies who could then make some money off the storage that's not currently rented to a customer. On the flip side, it will also likely kill really cheap cloud storage because why rent out storage for less than what you can make more mining with it?

[tszaboo]

Cryptocurrency is just idiotic any way you slice it. The only reason it's "worth" anything is because it is in limited supply and relies on some finite resource to mine it, whether that be electricity or GPUs or hard drives. It has become a massive environmental problem, consuming enormous amounts of energy and creating many tons of waste from all the hardware that is used just doing useless busy work, and it drives up prices on commodities that people could do something useful with.

It would really make my day if somebody found a way to crack it or some other event occurred that made the entire cryptocurrency economy collapse and implode and all of it become worthless. Making it a crime to mine it would be difficult to enforce but I would support that 100%. Some day people are going to look back on that fad and shake their head and the enormous amount of resources that went into producing worthless sequences of numbers.

You are talking about "proof of work" cryptos, that are 1 and 2nd generation.
There are "proof of stake" cryptos, that work entirely differently. Impossible to mine, and the energy usage is orders of mangitudes less. I mean a million times less. There are coins that are run by a dozen or so servers, without extreme hashing, just a CPU working for less than 2 seconds, when there is a transaction. Its more efficient, faster and cheaper than Visa.

[tom66]

You are talking about "proof of work" cryptos, that are 1 and 2nd generation.
There are "proof of stake" cryptos, that work entirely differently. Impossible to mine, and the energy usage is orders of mangitudes less. I mean a million times less. There are coins that are run by a dozen or so servers, without extreme hashing, just a CPU working for less than 2 seconds, when there is a transaction. Its more efficient, faster and cheaper than Visa.

A proof of stake crypto is, by definition, not decentralised though.  The 'whole idea' behind cryptocurrency was that no government could ever shut it down or stop the flow of crypto.  That is what makes it appealing, the problem is solving the mining issue without requiring ludicruous resources.

Proof of stake is no better than just using, say, 'Visa' because it is the same as Visa, but run by a different company.  PayPal was a startup once, now it is evil and not a startup. The same will happen to a proof of stake crypto.

[magic]

Someone should make a crypto which is mined by solving captchas. Then the price that spammers pay for such services would go through the roof and finally something would get better in the process

I hate the effect that crypto has on hardware economy as much as the next guy, but it does offer solutions to problems which nobody was willing to solve any other way, so

Oh, and good luck banning it

[tszaboo]

You are talking about "proof of work" cryptos, that are 1 and 2nd generation.
There are "proof of stake" cryptos, that work entirely differently. Impossible to mine, and the energy usage is orders of mangitudes less. I mean a million times less. There are coins that are run by a dozen or so servers, without extreme hashing, just a CPU working for less than 2 seconds, when there is a transaction. Its more efficient, faster and cheaper than Visa.

A proof of stake crypto is, by definition, not decentralised though.  The 'whole idea' behind cryptocurrency was that no government could ever shut it down or stop the flow of crypto.  That is what makes it appealing, the problem is solving the mining issue without requiring ludicruous resources.

Proof of stake is no better than just using, say, 'Visa' because it is the same as Visa, but run by a different company.  PayPal was a startup once, now it is evil and not a startup. The same will happen to a proof of stake crypto.

There are POS networks, where the nodes are run by community elected validators.
While I agree that we cannot predict the future, right now it is community run and (most of the coins) owned. In theory, you need to buy massive amounts of money to take over the network, same as BTC.

[mindcrime]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_distribution_game

Try arranging to play sometime with a few friends / co-workers etc. This "game" explains so very much about why supply chains are susceptible to disruption, and why almost everybody involved is doing the wrong thing from a systemic perspective, even when their actions seem entirely rational from a purely local perspective.

And on a semi-related note, I can't recommend The Fifth Discipline highly enough. It's where I learned about the Beer Game and so very much more. No, reading it isn't going to fix your supply chain problems in the short-term, but the kind of thinking that Senge promotes is, IMO, incredibly valuable in general.

[bsodmike]

Cheaper SSDs can be killed within a month as the plot files are large for Chia.  In the end, you are looking at many SSDs and even though generally power draw is "less", you're burning through SSDs at a high rate.  There'll be an increased demand of SSDs due to burning through them quickly; not entirely sure this is going to be very ecofriendly long term.