How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[station240]

[...]

TI is losing engineering customers, and it appears they could not care less as is evident by the spin and lack of transparency on their website. I wonder if TI's shareholders know about how they are treating engineers who are a source for future business.

As long as TI keeps the big customers happy, there has to be at least SOME engineers that still like them? 

Recent teardowns have shown Tesla electronics contain few/no TI chips.
So they are losing big customers too, especially crazy when it's a company building a huge factory in there home state/country.

[JPortici]

[...]

TI is losing engineering customers, and it appears they could not care less as is evident by the spin and lack of transparency on their website. I wonder if TI's shareholders know about how they are treating engineers who are a source for future business.

As long as TI keeps the big customers happy, there has to be at least SOME engineers that still like them? 

It's not that i want to use TI parts, it's just that TI has (some) LDOs that are difficult to replace, load switches that are very difficult to replace, opamps that are performing better than their equivalent from other manufacturers

[tszaboo]

[...]

TI is losing engineering customers, and it appears they could not care less as is evident by the spin and lack of transparency on their website. I wonder if TI's shareholders know about how they are treating engineers who are a source for future business.

As long as TI keeps the big customers happy, there has to be at least SOME engineers that still like them? 

It's not that i want to use TI parts, it's just that TI has (some) LDOs that are difficult to replace, load switches that are very difficult to replace, opamps that are performing better than their equivalent from other manufacturers

Or Low Iq DC-DC converters that are impossible to replace, temperature measurement parts that nobody has equivalent, battery protection circuits, that are 30 cents from TI when available, or you can search for some randomly performing parts from China, Instrumentation amplifiers, that nobody else makes, and even when they do (AD) the part performance is worse, or comes in a stupid package, ADCs and DACs that are 1/3 the price of the equivalent Linear Technology part.
Some of these parts have no equivalent, because design constrains.

[eti]

"Chip-a" what? Who makes up these daft names?

[T3sl4co1l]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

[coppice]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

Haven't you seen today's exclusive or-gate coverage? New claims are being added as I speak.

[IDEngineer]

"ChipGate".

Thanks, I'll be here all week. Don't forget to tip your server.

 

[rsjsouza]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

Haven't you seen today's exclusive or-gate coverage? New claims are being added as I speak.

Very wild claims, one must admit...

[KE5FX]

Hey, be glad it isn't "gate array-gate" or some stupid scandal like that.

Tim

Haven't you seen today's exclusive or-gate coverage? New claims are being added as I speak.

Very wild claims, one must admit...

But they're only being half-added.

[rs20]

"Chip-a" what? Who makes up these daft names?

What would you suggest?

[BrianHG]

Another 2 years of hell plus 1 more until things begin to get back to normal.

At least 4-5 years until we begin to forget about it.

[eti]

"Chip-a" what? Who makes up these daft names?

What would you suggest?

How about “the chip shortage”. - Why does everything have to be “branded” with some melodramatic title?
 

[T3sl4co1l]

Because that's how language works... something-geddons, something-gates -- memes, all of it.  You don't have to like it, and I'm not being apologetic here, just explaining, it happens.  Sometimes language changes, sometimes it doesn't; but it's inevitable sooner or later.

Tim

[eti]

Because that's how language works... something-geddons, something-gates -- memes, all of it.  You don't have to like it, and I'm not being apologetic here, just explaining, it happens.  Sometimes language changes, sometimes it doesn't; but it's inevitable sooner or later.

Tim

No no, it’s absolutely fine, I don’t mind one bit, I just chuckle when everything seems to have to be turned into a catchphrase or “brand”.

Shows how easily people buy into things like language trends. Sheep. Baaah.

[VK3DRB]

Hey, I didn't make up the name. I first heard it on the Australian ABC or the UK's BBC World Service early this year. If there was only a shortage of ARM Cortex processors, it would without doubt be called Armageddon .

There might be another issue at play here. Traditionally, the life cycle of a product was relatively very long, and the demand/supply "PID algorithm" was well understood. Now life cycles are very short and we had major sudden disturbances caused by the China virus, government legislation and cash splashing, consumers wanting the latest toy, lockdowns and electric cars. Soon we may well add a devastating major war to the list. It with these disturbances, the "PID algortihm" fails miserably.

[VK3DRB]

To provide some balance to this subtopic: This is one of the things I've always appreciated about Microchip. They give great support even to small customers. One of their inside sales folks once told me (paraphrased) "We understand that today's small customers are tomorrow's large customers, and we want you to still like us then."

Yes a good company but not so good with supply. The first time I experienced fallout from Chipageddon was when I needed one hundred Microchip ATWILC3000-MR110CA modules for design testing and to be used by scientists and programmers for further development work. Microchip did not have any. I believe the cause of the shortage of the Microchip modules was someone decided to use them in COVID respirators in early 2020. We cleaned out all the stock at Digikey, Mouse and Element 14, and Chinese/US grey market brokers. It took several weeks, but we got our 100 with absolutely none spare. The US broker offered us "seconds" in that there were benign defects in the modules (He sold them for the normal price and gave a warranty).

The module was excellent by the way.

[IDEngineer]

If there was only a shortage of ARM Cortex processors, it would without doubt be called Armageddon

Awesome! Voted best pun of the week!

[JPortici]

Because that's how language works... something-geddons, something-gates -- memes, all of it.  You don't have to like it, and I'm not being apologetic here, just explaining, it happens.  Sometimes language changes, sometimes it doesn't; but it's inevitable sooner or later.

Tim

more like laziness, things worked once -> let's reuse it.
The great chip shortage of 2021 is so last century

[rsjsouza]

"Chip-a" what? Who makes up these daft names?

What would you suggest?

How about “the chip shortage”. - Why does everything have to be “branded” with some melodramatic title?

Now you have done it!

How is Chipage affecting you?

[floobydust]

To confirm my suspicion the disti's analytics are screwing us over, try load up your cart with semi's and see what happens to those items. Just as an experiment 

All right, done. I've taken a screen shot of my current DigiKey cart, which consists of five ICs: two microcontrollers, a quad op-amp, a switching regulator, and a battery charger. I'll check back Monday after work, just in case these bots only work Monday to Friday.

Update: None of the parts sold out from under me.

5 IC's is not going to trigger anything. That's a flea fart. Lastest time, I had qty. 20 (all they had in stock) DSP about $1,000 in the cart, and gone in the hour.
Just puttin' it forward my belief is brokers have insider info from the website analytics and can be acting on that to our disadvantage.
Procurement/Purchasing is safer to import and do an order as one transaction, instead if working on it for hours/days, which gives them (scumbag brokers and scalpers) time to decide and act if they should scoop up those parts in other's cart.

[rsjsouza]

Despite I can see a possibility of this happening due to activity monitoring, I can't help but think how risky this operation would be - especially in the volume and level that you mentioned. Is it reasonable to think that someone expressing intent to buy a relatively expensive part ($50 ea) at a puny volume would be a trigger to a broker take a risky financial penalty to gobble up the entire stock? Of course, if the part is excessively popular and the price is good this would be understandable, but occam's razor applies.

If this is about the dollar threshold, these days it is not really hard to reach it: I can get many thousands of dollars to a shopping cart without thinking much.

[rs20]

5 IC's is not going to trigger anything. That's a flea fart. Lastest time, I had qty. 20 (all they had in stock) DSP about $1,000 in the cart, and gone in the hour.

You might need a little crash course on double-blind studies and how easily we can fool ourselves by single-sided unblinded experiments and anecdotes.

The idea that you notice chips going out of stock during a chip shortage, and leap to the assumption that it's because of the state of your cart just because of a coincidence on the order of hours... rather than because there's a chip shortage... let's just say "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

I've seen TQFP ATMEGA32U4's and MA12070Ps go out of stock while I had them sitting in my cart (only single digit quantities, "a flea fart" as you would put it). Some other parts that I shortlisted but never added to my cart went out of stock too. So, in short:

"flea farts" in cart: not going out of stock (cortex_m0)
"flea farts" in cart: going out of stock (rs20)
"flea farts" not in cart: not going out of stock (rs20)
"flea farts" not in cart: going out of stock (rs20)
"1k order" in cart: not going out of stock (rsjsouza)
"1k order" in cart: going out of stock (floobydust)

Looks a lot more consistent with "good single-vendor parts don't stay in stock very long these days and pretty regularly/randomly go out of stock" than "the bad men are snooping on floobydust's shopping cart"

It might be fun to do a proper test though. Lots of parts, and privately held "control carts" to see the background rate of things going out of stock outside our carts so that we can then actually compare that to the rate of things going out of stock within our carts.

(Also, isn't the fact that the distributor only had 20 left in stock of your DSP IC enough of a hint to scalpers? I'd have thought that's a far better signal and also way less tin-foil-hat of a theory that the 'everyone's snooping on floobydust's cart' theory)

[SilverSolder]

Some people believe the same thing happens when they shop for airline tickets, i.e. the prices go up when "they" know you are searching for that particular journey...   Could do with some scientific testing/debunking too!

[chickenHeadKnob]

Some people believe the same thing happens when they shop for airline tickets, i.e. the prices go up when "they" know you are searching for that particular journey...   Could do with some scientific testing/debunking too!

But there IS dynamic pricing in air fares ! Maybe not in the simplistic way the conspiracy prone think. Airlines try to maximize load factor times ticket price right up to departure. A consumer visible method is with stand-by tickets but it goes way beyond that. In Canada there are 2 majors serving domestic travel; Air Canada and West Jet with West Jet being the Southwest Airlines model type of operation. Some years back there was a court case against a West Jet Manager who had obtained login credentials for the Air Canada reservations system and was skimming their system to optimize West Jet per ticket pricing dynamically on various competing routes.

[SilverSolder]

Some people believe the same thing happens when they shop for airline tickets, i.e. the prices go up when "they" know you are searching for that particular journey...   Could do with some scientific testing/debunking too!

But there IS dynamic pricing in air fares ! Maybe not in the simplistic way the conspiracy prone think. Airlines try to maximize load factor times ticket price right up to departure. A consumer visible method is with stand-by tickets but it goes way beyond that. In Canada there are 2 majors serving domestic travel; Air Canada and West Jet with West Jet being the Southwest Airlines model type of operation. Some years back there was a court case against a West Jet Manager who had obtained login credentials for the Air Canada reservations system and was skimming their system to optimize West Jet per ticket pricing dynamically on various competing routes.

Aren't stand-by tickets a thing of the past? -  after all, that goes against the "dynamic pricing" model (mustn't let consumers think it will be cheaper if they wait, under ANY circumstances)!