How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[SiliconWizard]

No worries...  as soon as "they" have created the inflation they feel they need, Chipageddon will magically disappear and everything will be available again...   at a new, improved, higher price level, blamed on the shortages!   

Well... I'm not sure who the "they" refers to... =)
(Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm not sure who that all is.)

One thing though - with the gigantic amounts of "created" cash that has been injected into the economy during the Covid-19 crisis (and it's probably not over), basic maths and economy would tell us that significant inflation is inevitable - and indeed, it's already there, and far from just with semiconductors.

[jmelson]

Well, the Xilinx Spartan 3A chips I ordered last September finally showed up!
Jon

[coppice]

No worries...  as soon as "they" have created the inflation they feel they need, Chipageddon will magically disappear and everything will be available again...   at a new, improved, higher price level, blamed on the shortages!   

Well... I'm not sure who the "they" refers to... =)
(Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm not sure who that all is.)

One thing though - with the gigantic amounts of "created" cash that has been injected into the economy during the Covid-19 crisis (and it's probably not over), basic maths and economy would tell us that significant inflation is inevitable - and indeed, it's already there, and far from just with semiconductors.

They've been "quantatively easing" since 2008, injecting huge amounts of new dollars into the economy without apparent inflation. That's because until COVID it mostly went into inflating asset prices. What changed in the COVID era is they injected some of the new dollars into the average person's bank account, at a time when saving was not the average person's highest priority, and the production of goods and services was weak.

[DC1MC]

if someone would telling me 2 years ago that in near future the only way how to get some atmega32u4 micros in small quantities would be to salvage them from Lilypad clone boards... i would not believe him 

What is wrong with Digikey, too expensive  ?
https://www.digikey.de/de/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATMEGA32U4RC-MUR/2774249?utm_campaign=buynow

most probably the fact that they have only the RC version ? ... RC has a internal calibrated RC oscillator, no option for external XTAL.

Say what  ?!?

 Who told you these strange things, I'm sorry but extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, AFAIK is just setting in the clock selector register, if one has a large scale production must do extra steps, but IMHO, for small scale production were you've said that you unsolder parts from boards, setting some bits does not seem to be a problem.

AFAIK, the RC version was a bit more expensive because they hat the internal osc "calibrated" (probably actually sorted) and in the times of abundance few cents were a lot of the profit margin.

But to summarize, kindly please indicate me where is written that an RC version could not be converted to an extenal crystal version ?

[IDEngineer]

No worries...  as soon as "they" have created the inflation they feel they need, Chipageddon will magically disappear and everything will be available again...   at a new, improved, higher price level, blamed on the shortages!   

Well... I'm not sure who the "they" refers to... =)
(Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm not sure who that all is.)

One thing though - with the gigantic amounts of "created" cash that has been injected into the economy during the Covid-19 crisis (and it's probably not over), basic maths and economy would tell us that significant inflation is inevitable - and indeed, it's already there, and far from just with semiconductors.

They've been "quantatively easing" since 2008, injecting huge amounts of new dollars into the economy without apparent inflation. That's because until COVID it mostly went into inflating asset prices. What changed in the COVID era is they injected some of the new dollars into the average person's bank account, at a time when saving was not the average person's highest priority, and the production of goods and services was weak.

It's only possible to artificially suppress natural forces for so long. We have a LOT of pent-up inflation due to all the fiat money that's been dumped into the world economy since ~2008 and we're starting to see the first signs of natural forces reasserting themselves. Central banks have few arrows left in their quivers to do anything about it since they've been holding interest rates near zero for years to keep the cork in the bottle. But now, COVID-19's supply chain problems have absolutely ripped the cork out of the bottle. Not sure there are any options left except to ride it out.

[nctnico]

if someone would telling me 2 years ago that in near future the only way how to get some atmega32u4 micros in small quantities would be to salvage them from Lilypad clone boards... i would not believe him 

What is wrong with Digikey, too expensive  ?
https://www.digikey.de/de/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATMEGA32U4RC-MUR/2774249?utm_campaign=buynow

most probably the fact that they have only the RC version ? ... RC has a internal calibrated RC oscillator, no option for external XTAL.

That is not how I read the datasheet; it looks like you can set the oscillator through software and thus switch from internal RC to external crystal and the Xtal version has a USB bootloader. All in all not a big problem compared to getting no chips at all.

[DC1MC]

if someone would telling me 2 years ago that in near future the only way how to get some atmega32u4 micros in small quantities would be to salvage them from Lilypad clone boards... i would not believe him 

What is wrong with Digikey, too expensive  ?
https://www.digikey.de/de/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATMEGA32U4RC-MUR/2774249?utm_campaign=buynow

Yeah, some misconception and a bit of an increased price saved these "elite" parts to be gobbles, but they will found soon enough when the supply of boards to desolder from will dry  , it may be too late tough.


most probably the fact that they have only the RC version ? ... RC has a internal calibrated RC oscillator, no option for external XTAL.

That is not how I read the datasheet; it looks like you can set the oscillator through software and thus switch from internal RC to external crystal and the Xtal version has a USB bootloader. All in all not a big problem compared to getting no chips at all.

[rob77]

if someone would telling me 2 years ago that in near future the only way how to get some atmega32u4 micros in small quantities would be to salvage them from Lilypad clone boards... i would not believe him 

What is wrong with Digikey, too expensive  ?
https://www.digikey.de/de/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATMEGA32U4RC-MUR/2774249?utm_campaign=buynow

most probably the fact that they have only the RC version ? ... RC has a internal calibrated RC oscillator, no option for external XTAL.

That is not how I read the datasheet; it looks like you can set the oscillator through software and thus switch from internal RC to external crystal and the Xtal version has a USB bootloader. All in all not a big problem compared to getting no chips at all.

yes not a problem you just rewrite the software, accept the low speed USB instead of full speed... not a big deal   when i need 5 of them i will rather salvage from 9euro lylipadboards than rewriting the software to "save" 4 euro a piece and overpay the saving several times on time spent
i need the micro as a usb2 hid device, not sure how would the user accept the several usb connect/disconnect ding-dong sounds and the several second delay till the device is usable.  (the micro would start on RC as a low speed USB device, then after switch to XTAL it would disconnect and reconnect as full speed USB device)

[VK3DRB]

... No shortages of Espressif....

Chipageddon continues to worsen but there's no industry insiders saying a peep, so who knows the real situation?

I suspect the reason companies are quiet is they want to protect their share price. I have read TI's stock exchange announcements and annual reports. Nowhere do they say "In the medium to long term, sales may be impacted because engineers are designing using alternative parts because we don't bother supporting the small guy with parts in the early design phase." It is also somewhat frustrating when companies advertise their new and wonderful parts with emails and yet they are clearly NIL STOCK everywhere.

Not only that, but how many design-ins did TI lose because of the shortage? I have removed quite a few TI chips from my designs in order to have the designs produced in a reasonable time frame. I'm not going to design the TI chips back in at any point if the product works.

Not forgetting the impact and big costs for re-compliance testing. And also modifying firmware to drive various chips. TI can come grovelling all they want but no-one is going to revert back to TI chip once a change is made. TI need to understand the market implications of leaving their smaller customers out in the cold. I seriously don't think they do.

I have a major client where TI DC-DC switching converter chips have been replaced with an alternative design from another manufacturer. I was a big fan of the TI bq battery charger chips, but now have used alternative brands for those and the fuel gauge chips. None of us will be reverting back to TI on an existing design, even if TI's has a "welcome back fire sale" on their chips or even offer chips for free. TI also has the issue of once bitten, twice shy".

There is only so much of this rubbish an engineer can take before he pulls the pin and changes careers to something less stressful.

[jonpaul]

Bonjour, Our firm suffered 50..100% cost increases on cores and lead time went from 16 weeks to 48 weeks.


The lead times and shortages stem from many longstanding causes:

Government Central banks Debasement of Fiat currencies,  especially the US $.

JIT manufacture (no one keeps stock on the shelf anymore)

 Government Virus restrictions and mandates affecting all shipping/logistic and factories

Chinese central planning resulting in degraded  electric grid reliability to factories

Various IC fab factory fires with very long recovery to rebuild.

Design/BOM Lack of second sources


These problems will eventually be worked out but expect 1..3 years before parts are again easily available.

In our  Capitalist system (whats left of it)   economics 101 law of supply and demand still works to adjust prices to a natural level. Also the effect of elasticity of demand.

"History: Just one damn thig after another!"


Winston S. Churchill

Bon chance,

Jon

[harerod]

...
I have a major client where TI DC-DC switching converter chips have been replaced with an alternative design from another manufacturer. I was a big fan of the TI bq battery charger chips, but now have used alternative brands for those and the fuel gauge chips.
...

Are you allowed to share those brand names? We're looking into replace BQ40Z50. This is due to a huge increase of price (400% and then unoptanium), as well as TI's crappy attitude towards medium scale production support (firmware update algorithm is proprietary, which means you either have to use EV2400 with cumbersome and slow TI Battery Studio or have them pre-programmed by TI. Great show, especially if the only source for those chips is some Asian scalper).
In the above mentioned design, the one that suffered from the betrayal by Mouser, we also had to replace several TI components by other brands. Among them the buck-converter, a component most interesting when it comes to EMC.
I also had to downgrade the MCU to something smaller, but available. As a result I will quickly rewrite the RTOS-based firmware to something less resource hungry. Boy, am I looking forward to applying all that 1990's firmware know-how again.

At this time I fully expect schematic/layout changes for every single production run.

[free_electron]

when i need 5 of them

you don't have a chip shortage issue.. you have a distributer problem.

[free_electron]

TI can come grovelling all they want but no-one is going to revert back to TI chip once a change is made.

the beancounters may have something to say about that.

1) You have the design with TI chips in production.
2) You do a board spin to accommodate something else.
3) when the shortage is over : since you had a working design in fab it costs nothing to switch back. If the ti part is cheaper , TI will win. you don't get to decide. The beancounters will.

there is a difference between 'in design' and 'in production'. you may not want to design in new TI parts but the production will switch to whatever is cheapest.

[Vtile]

As a end user of eg. Siemens and Rockwell industrial electronics the supply is dry from certain products, no promises or dates, fortunately I do not work in logistics department trying to source parts.

I do wonder when the factories start to fall, because lack of spare parts.

JOT always works and stock is a waste! After reading the JIT- and then JOT-chapters someone forgot to turn the page to see a new following chapter: 'Redundancy of systems - ROS' 

[tom66]

Not only that, but how many design-ins did TI lose because of the shortage? I have removed quite a few TI chips from my designs in order to have the designs produced in a reasonable time frame. I'm not going to design the TI chips back in at any point if the product works.

We designed out a load of TI parts and replaced them with Maxim and Microchip parts for this exact reason.  Think about that!  Maxim winning over TI, that's unusual.

TI makes zero effort to communicate with engineers regarding availability, and there's no way to pre-order parts on allocation as a small guy.  You can just play the lottery and hope you catch them appear in the store before they all disappear.  Once tried that and they vanished in 5 minutes while the store crashed out completely.

So yep... TI losing design wins here.

[Siwastaja]

What's with all this TI talk?

I don't see how TI's any worse than the others, no one is delivering pretty much anything. Can't even get electrolytic capacitors from the usual suspects.

And no one is communicating. Why would they waste their resources in that, they are in panic mode just like us. No one can give good estimates, if they could, they would just fix things. I don't want to hear any empty customer service BS from them, I just wait they get production up and backlogs emptied.

Maxim is interesting of course, it seems their strategy of not selling parts and thus have no design-ins wins now, their products make great emergency design-ins.

[SiliconWizard]

No worries...  as soon as "they" have created the inflation they feel they need, Chipageddon will magically disappear and everything will be available again...   at a new, improved, higher price level, blamed on the shortages!   

Well... I'm not sure who the "they" refers to... =)
(Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm not sure who that all is.)

One thing though - with the gigantic amounts of "created" cash that has been injected into the economy during the Covid-19 crisis (and it's probably not over), basic maths and economy would tell us that significant inflation is inevitable - and indeed, it's already there, and far from just with semiconductors.

They've been "quantatively easing" since 2008, injecting huge amounts of new dollars into the economy without apparent inflation. That's because until COVID it mostly went into inflating asset prices. What changed in the COVID era is they injected some of the new dollars into the average person's bank account, at a time when saving was not the average person's highest priority, and the production of goods and services was weak.

It's only possible to artificially suppress natural forces for so long. We have a LOT of pent-up inflation due to all the fiat money that's been dumped into the world economy since ~2008 and we're starting to see the first signs of natural forces reasserting themselves. Central banks have few arrows left in their quivers to do anything about it since they've been holding interest rates near zero for years to keep the cork in the bottle. But now, COVID-19's supply chain problems have absolutely ripped the cork out of the bottle. Not sure there are any options left except to ride it out.

Yup. Thinking we can avoid inflation doing that is just stupid. It's magical thinking. Just as we can artificially inject money, we can artificially make it look like it doesn't create inflation using even more artificial means. But that can only postpone it for a few years.

The upcoming issues were already known *before* the Covid-19 crisis, so I don't even think this is the cause. It just has precipitated the process while making it look like it's all due to an external event, and of course, not to anything we could have possibly done. It was already inevitable before that. IMHO.

[floobydust]

It's not hard to forecast demand for semiconductors. Hint: positive slope. We've known how much silicon is needed years ahead, it's just that there's no planning or incentive to increase onshore production. Keeping up with demand growth did not happen and years of lag, waving the magic wand for more production or "muh bring it home" ain't gonna do anything for many years. Taiwan's situation is also a big danger.

Fabs are heavily government subsidized. Nobody will build a new fab without incentives. I think the political lag on this is a huge part of the problem- never mind that it takes 3-5years to build something, it is bureaucrats that would rather let companies outsource than build local and only after a slap in the face do the governments and industry take action.
New fabs in the USA are getting massive publicly-funded incentives like 90% tax breaks/rebates on property taxes, grants, infrastructure improvements etc.
Samsung seeking $1.77B incentives over 20-years from Austin and Travis county.
Micron is shopping around/
TI Sherman, Texas.

So we're losing another year or two as manufacturers shop around for the best incentives. Nobody's noticed china has 85% of the world's polysilicon production so they'll still have the fabs by the balls when the time comes.

Results from Semiconductor Supply Chain Request for Information, US Dept. of Commerce

[VK3DRB]

...
I have a major client where TI DC-DC switching converter chips have been replaced with an alternative design from another manufacturer. I was a big fan of the TI bq battery charger chips, but now have used alternative brands for those and the fuel gauge chips.
...

Are you allowed to share those brand names? We're looking into replace BQ40Z50. This is due to a huge increase of price (400% and then unoptanium), as well as TI's crappy attitude towards medium scale production support (firmware update algorithm is proprietary, which means you either have to use EV2400 with cumbersome and slow TI Battery Studio or have them pre-programmed by TI. Great show, especially if the only source for those chips is some Asian scalper).
In the above mentioned design, the one that suffered from the betrayal by Mouser, we also had to replace several TI components by other brands. Among them the buck-converter, a component most interesting when it comes to EMC.
I also had to downgrade the MCU to something smaller, but available. As a result I will quickly rewrite the RTOS-based firmware to something less resource hungry. Boy, am I looking forward to applying all that 1990's firmware know-how again.

At this time I fully expect schematic/layout changes for every single production run.

STNS01 (lower max charging current though) and Maxim have some good chips. ST is a basket case for their micros, but their charger chips were available last time I looked. Not quite as great as say the terrific TI BQ24250, but good enough for some recent applications. The Maxim has an excellent fuel gauge chip I have been using as a substitute... the MAX17048G+T10. I had never used this before and I am happy with it. Not too expensive and very easy to interface. I also did a design using a Cypress CYBLE module and used an embedded fuel gauge algorithm which worked perfectly, so no fuel gauge chip was required.

There are some newer BQ chips released, but I have little trust and confidence that TI will supply these in the longer term based on their past performance. I am nervous about TI. But I have noticed TI BGA chips are generally more plentiful the VFQN, TSSOPs etc, so BGA might be viable providing you put in test points for each net if possible.

TI's buck and boost converters are were very cost effective. And, thanks to the Webench, they just worked (I still use the datasheet though to customise designs more to my requirements and to avoid needless odd-ball resistor values.) That's why we use them. I generally add low cost chip ferrites at the input and output of their converters and have never had a problem with EMC.

Analogue device have some amazing new patented high current DC-DC converter chips that are ultra quiet.
https://www.analog.com/en/parametricsearch/11497#/

[jrs45]

TI made me angry with this morning's spam email:

[Siwastaja]

If you are angry with TI, try Bosch Sensortec.

Parts discontinued without prior notice, history of active parts ever existing wiped off from the website overnight. Recommended replacements being again discontinued within months. Whole active product lines being wiped out without notice. "Replacements" are not compatible at all, not even perform the same function (no, you can't replace magnetometer with an accelerometer).

And, no communication - total silence - even to distributors, driving distributors into special "they don't talk to us at all" blacklisting practices never seen before.

[Kasper]

As a end user of eg. Siemens and Rockwell industrial electronics the supply is dry from certain products, no promises or dates, fortunately I do not work in logistics department trying to source parts.

I do wonder when the factories start to fall, because lack of spare parts.

JOT always works and stock is a waste! After reading the JIT- and then JOT-chapters someone forgot to turn the page to see a new following chapter: 'Redundancy of systems - ROS' 

That could take this to a whole nother level.  How much backup supply do factories usually hold?

[Kasper]

No worries...  as soon as "they" have created the inflation they feel they need, Chipageddon will magically disappear and everything will be available again...   at a new, improved, higher price level, blamed on the shortages!   

Well... I'm not sure who the "they" refers to... =)
(Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm not sure who that all is.)

One thing though - with the gigantic amounts of "created" cash that has been injected into the economy during the Covid-19 crisis (and it's probably not over), basic maths and economy would tell us that significant inflation is inevitable - and indeed, it's already there, and far from just with semiconductors.

They've been "quantatively easing" since 2008, injecting huge amounts of new dollars into the economy without apparent inflation. That's because until COVID it mostly went into inflating asset prices. What changed in the COVID era is they injected some of the new dollars into the average person's bank account, at a time when saving was not the average person's highest priority, and the production of goods and services was weak.

It's only possible to artificially suppress natural forces for so long. We have a LOT of pent-up inflation due to all the fiat money that's been dumped into the world economy since ~2008 and we're starting to see the first signs of natural forces reasserting themselves. Central banks have few arrows left in their quivers to do anything about it since they've been holding interest rates near zero for years to keep the cork in the bottle. But now, COVID-19's supply chain problems have absolutely ripped the cork out of the bottle. Not sure there are any options left except to ride it out.

Yup. Thinking we can avoid inflation doing that is just stupid. It's magical thinking. Just as we can artificially inject money, we can artificially make it look like it doesn't create inflation using even more artificial means. But that can only postpone it for a few years.

The upcoming issues were already known *before* the Covid-19 crisis, so I don't even think this is the cause. It just has precipitated the process while making it look like it's all due to an external event, and of course, not to anything we could have possibly done. It was already inevitable before that. IMHO.

Steve Saretsky makes videos on youtube about this.  His repeat guest Jeff Booth talks about how this is inevitable. 

Inflation sucks when you live off an hourly wage and it doesn't increase as fast as cost of living but it's great if you live off investments.  Unless there is a big crash that you are not prepared for.

I don't think the people who control inflation want to avoid inflation.  They do seem to want to avoid getting in trouble for causing too much inflation.  They typically make personal profits off of inflation.   Aside from their personal goals, governments hold a lot of debt and inflation reduces the severity of that debt.  They keep pumping because they focus on results during their brief rein.  As long as the crash doesn't happen until after they get replaced then it doesn't really affect them, aside from making an opportunity to get deals on new investments.

Evidence of this is the Canadian CPI (consumer price index) nicknamed CP-lie because it tends to underestimate inflation.

[IDEngineer]

If you are angry with TI, try Bosch Sensortec. Parts discontinued without prior notice, history of active parts ever existing wiped off from the website overnight. Recommended replacements being again discontinued within months. Whole active product lines being wiped out without notice. "Replacements" are not compatible at all, not even perform the same function (no, you can't replace magnetometer with an accelerometer). And, no communication - total silence - even to distributors, driving distributors into special "they don't talk to us at all" blacklisting practices never seen before.

100% agree on Bosch Sensortec, as I've mentioned before. Literally the worst semi manufacturer behavior I've ever seen in 40+ years of this industry.

I was going to post a different TI ad I saw today but the above sends the message. The one I saw said something like "Get exclusive preproduction access!" Heck, I'd like PRODUCTION access on current parts, please.

[KE5FX]

My "favorite" spam emails:



PSemi's chips are a key requirement for my work, completely out of stock for months at a time with delivery forecasts in the "Don't even ask, we don't know either" category.  So they are all but rubbing my nose in the fact that there are no second sources for their products.  Read the room, geniuses!