How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[floobydust]

In that case, who is using up all the chips? [...]

Demand is always increasing, whether for semi's or crude oil. The pandemic caused an additional spike in consumer electronics demand, smartphones and PCs. china started hoarding as a reaction to the US sanctions. Record numbers of semi's are being sold.

There's no magical unicorn that tells companies to prepare to make more, fab more, drill more etc. and why would you- as the prices go up nicely.
As I've said, why build a new fab it's very costly and will make you look bad as a CEO because quarterly profit matters, not investment. Only now after governments offer multi-billion $ tax concessions and grants do these semi companies decide to get off their lazy ass and expand.
I don't see this "ramping up" crap happening, the time-constant is too large and IQ too low for the executives floundering about, after the obvious fact is in their face they should have planned ahead, they should not have off-shored as much as possible, Asia is the King of the Semiconductor industry.

But why would a car manufacturer let cars pile up with pieces missing? Knowing Ford, they would sell cars without doors if they had to. [...]

If a module is "coming in soon", it makes sense to keep production rolling and fill up the parking lot... but after you fill up Dirt Mountain with a 3 month queue, that looks like a scary strategy. Other cars lost Park Assist, heated seat climate controls etc. It seems like (BCM) modules are being built minus some IC's.

[tom66]

My guess is some Broncos can't leave because they're missing more essential parts, like ECUs or brake controllers.   Though the less SUVs - the better!

Certain parts will be essential to the certification of the overall product too.  It would be difficult to substitute wireless modules, or things in control of lights, even if alternatives are available.  I noticed recently on a video of the disassembly of the Tesla Model 3 headlamp, that HELLA had three different LED driver IC options available. 

[coppice]

But why would a car manufacturer let cars pile up with pieces missing? Knowing Ford, they would sell cars without doors if they had to. There must be a regulatory reason they can't let these cars onto the road.

I've seen video of Fords being made, driven into the storage area, and the engine control unit then being removed to put in the next vehicle, so it can get off the line. So, engine control is one area them seem to lack parts, and that's pretty fundamental. Many car makers are not offering certain bells and whistles on their cars right now, but if they can't get core things like the engine control module they clearly can't ship any cars.

As to why production would continue, that's easy. It takes a long time to make a car. It takes a while to make things like casings and mechanics for engine control modules. However, if you keep producing those things, when a batch of chips arrives you can have a PnP assembly line produce a huge number of modules in a day, and start getting those vehicles out to customers.

[Ranayna]

For how long can an essentially finished car that is standing around somewhere without an ECU, be actually considered, and more importantly sold, as "new"?
If it was driven to storage, all the fluids are in there. Would it not require quite a bit of maintenance after a couple of months?
Depending on the local climate, letting a car just sit in the open for a couple of months will be very noticable.

Is there any precedence for something like this?

[madires]

For how long can an essentially finished car that is standing around somewhere without an ECU, be actually considered, and more importantly sold, as "new"?

In Germany that would be 12 months as the federal court of justice ruled in 2003 (in German: http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/document.py?Gericht=bgh&Art=en&sid=4dcc9fb43f81377dc22228956a5ff771&nr=27662&pos=0&anz=1).

[Ranayna]

Now the big question is of course: What is actually the manufacturing date, in a legal sense?
In all practical sense I would say a nearly finished car standing around in storage, especially when it was driven there, should be considered as manufactured. Should not be my problem if they broke it again by removing the ECU

But i'm sure the manufacturers will argue that the manufacturing date is the day the final essential component was installed.

[cdev]

Can you make simpler, more basic products?

Ones that don't need the scarce components? When are they necessary?

I'm guessing you've not spent the last month or so trawling every corner of the market trying to put together the kit for a product on which your livelihood depends.

This is what I do every single day, sadly.

The supply situation is "irritating" just like losing a hand in a table saw is "itchy".

The irritation I was referring to isn't the "supply situation", that's incredibly frustrating and a huge time and money sink.  The "irritation" is at the speculators.  The speculators can't be blamed for the shortage.  They are a minor factor, if that.  If they didn't buy them up, someone would have been hoarding them anyway, and they wouldn't be available at any price.

[cdev]

There is a little bit about Electronics and chips in Peter Drahos's and John Braithewaite's book, "Information Feudalism". It might explain some of what is going on when products subject to patents, copyright, etc. are being sold. for example on Page 125 talking about the GATT IP Basic Framework and companies like TI. This was in the late 1980s when this was being written. With lots of input from large US electronics firms. This is when Japan was a larger player in semiconductors than now, I think.

In any case its a good book, worth reading. About the history of patentingand so called "intellectual property" which amounts to a global power grab in a number of areas.

[cortex_m0]

But why would a car manufacturer let cars pile up with pieces missing? Knowing Ford, they would sell cars without doors if they had to. There must be a regulatory reason they can't let these cars onto the road.

The Broncos are in demand, in many cases the cars already have buyers waiting for delivery. Ford has an assembly plant that literally can't build anything else. Ford has a union workforce with whom the company has agreed to rules for reducing work hours.

Keeping the assembly plant going is almost certainly the right move.

[BravoV]

Sometimes one needs to think out of the box or different paradigm ... maybe ... just maybe that "the currency" value is shrinking.

My 2 cents.

[cortex_m0]

It has to be simple hoarding by somebody. But who? I reckon the phone makers and medium size industrials are hoarding it. The car makers are powerful but got caught out because they ran a too-tight supply pipeline and always working on the principle that f*****g their suppliers will always be possible.

Buying parts for your realistic future production is not hoarding, especially not in a world where the components have long and variable lead times. If Microchip says 60 weeks lead time on some AVR controller, I'd be stupid to not have 70 or 80 weeks of my production quantities ordered.

[Stray Electron]

For how long can an essentially finished car that is standing around somewhere without an ECU, be actually considered, and more importantly sold, as "new"?

Is there any precedence for something like this?

  Answer to question 2 first.  I don't know but I'm sure that there is.

   Answer 1. I'm fairly certain that in the US a car is still considered "New" as long as it has never been "sold" to a retail customer. Actually I think the criteria is that retail customer hasn't taken delivery of it. So a car might have been sold on paper but if they customer didn't take possession of it, then i THINK that the car is still technically new. But even if a car is "new" it will still be a model 2021 or whatever model year that it was built in.

   We bought one new car was a year model 2000 but they were already selling 2002 models when we bought it. The paint color was hideous and it had been sitting in the sales lot for well over a year. We got a very good deal on it so I bought it and repainted the top half of the car a lighter color so it had a two tone paint job and it looked great after that.

   In the US, bargain hunters frequently buy last year model cars that are still on the sales lot after the new year model cars start arriving.

   In the US I don't think that there's any legal distinction between a used car or a new car. The only people that it really matters to are to the banks. They typically give "new" car buyers a slightly better interest rate than they do to "used" car buyers.

[IDEngineer]

Not sure how "new" is defined in all contexts, but for vehicles in the United States an earlier-year vehicle is still "new" until it has been sold and the trigger is that the warranty has started. I learned of this because I am a fan of a certain brand of low-volume car and there are occasionally units for sale as "used" from a dealer which have single-digit mileage on their odometers. What I discovered was, to meet quotas with the factory, some dealers will "sell" a car by registering the warranty (to whom, I'm not sure), thus starting the clock. Legally then they can only list the vehicle as "used" even though its physical condition has not changed at all. This trick yielded the bizarre practice of new cars being ranked by how many months of warranty still remained.

Earlier-year vehicles are common enough that the term "leftover" is well recognized for them. We bought a boat in late 2010 that was a model year 2009 and could have been actually manufactured in late 2008 (you know how "model years" work) yet it was considered a leftover, brand new, with full factory warranty that started the day we took possession. This despite that it could have easily been a full two years old when ownership transferred to us. "New Old Stock" (NOS) is another term in many industries for brand-new items in this situation.

[floobydust]

The Bronco problems - hardtop roof delaminating, leaks, rattles, Ford replacing all of the moulded ones, then the Ver 2.0 replacement also leaking... body gaps causing A-pillar and windshield leaking...  It might be good to have them lemonizing in the parking lot I guess.

Ford appears to be back to their old ways of making not so great vehicles. Their stock is getting punished with billions in warranty claims, recalls, and the plummeting sales figures.
I guess it's worse now that Tesla introduced this "pre-ordering" norm and the pressure to slap a car together and ship it out, is so high. Everyone is scrambling and when rushed it does for more make mistakes.

[Bassman59]

For how long can an essentially finished car that is standing around somewhere without an ECU, be actually considered, and more importantly sold, as "new"?

It is considered "new" until sold to the first customer.

Cars that are still new but unsold when the next year's models start arriving at dealers are called "leftovers" and usually the dealer will price them "aggressively" in order to get them off of the lot.

[SilverSolder]

The Bronco problems - hardtop roof delaminating, leaks, rattles, Ford replacing all of the moulded ones, then the Ver 2.0 replacement also leaking... body gaps causing A-pillar and windshield leaking...  It might be good to have them lemonizing in the parking lot I guess.

Ford appears to be back to their old ways of making not so great vehicles. Their stock is getting punished with billions in warranty claims, recalls, and the plummeting sales figures.
I guess it's worse now that Tesla introduced this "pre-ordering" norm and the pressure to slap a car together and ship it out, is so high. Everyone is scrambling and when rushed it does for more make mistakes.

It's amazing that with >100 years of experience building cars, Ford can still make n00b mistakes.   (I own 2 Fords, I like them!  - but I wouldn't buy a Bronco for a while...)

[free_electron]

i was looking this afternoon for an Atmega. ANY popular atmega .. Digikey : NONE ! ZERO. Apart from some crufty dil packages from some dubious supplier.... and that too at 11$ a pop ... holy smokes. for something with 16k of flash. 11$ !

[Mangozac]

i was looking this afternoon for an Atmega. ANY popular atmega .. Digikey : NONE ! ZERO. Apart from some crufty dil packages from some dubious supplier.... and that too at 11$ a pop ... holy smokes. for something with 16k of flash. 11$ !

A customer of ours has an ATMEGA based design and it just took them two months to find a suitable alternative part because everything is out of stock. The replacement still requires a package change and a bit of firmware tweaking. I had suggested they switch to one of the PIC parts that we keep in stock (and have forward orders for over the next 18 months) but because they are writing code in Arduino this wasn't an option.

[floobydust]

i was looking this afternoon for an Atmega. ANY popular atmega .. Digikey : NONE ! ZERO. Apart from some crufty dil packages from some dubious supplier.... and that too at 11$ a pop ... holy smokes. for something with 16k of flash. 11$ !

I know, it's brutal. Things are way too quiet about it, very creepy and then people talk as if it's not that bad    muh no Arduino's or RPi's and $2 for obsolete LM555's.
Just changed a design over to a PIC only because I could get them, it's a different tool chain and buggy Microchip sample code, but no other option right now.

Everyone in the semiconductor manufacturing business is not saying anything, so we have no idea of what's really going on.
"chinese mainland chip production falls in Q1, down 4.2% worst performance since Q1 2019." JW Insights Consulting (Xiamen) Co. and other talk about demand falling. Then On-semi shuts plant in Shanghai due to covid.
MCU's are essential and everyone is making %&(!@!@#$ smartphone chips to keep Apple/Foxconn happy.

[Messtechniker]

Delivery date for Husq Automower 405 changed from
mid May to unknown, because of component availability probs.
Luckily it is a non-essential item. Things could be worse.

[nvmR]

Unfortunately, I'm not believing market forces can regulate this back to norm. I think we are not very far away from the government "distributing" chips by priority.
It just isn't logical that hypothetically someone is making TVs because he snagged the right chips, while due to the same chips, John Deere can't get a tractor out.

[floobydust]

Delivery date for Husq Automower 405 changed from mid May to unknown, because of component availability probs.
Luckily it is a non-essential item. Things could be worse.

How could they be worse? Inflation is out of control, we've got a war going on trashing commodities/energy supplies and covid shutdowns in Shanghai at week 7. Next winter you will be quite cold.
The supply chain really is upside down and under more stress, those effects I don't think have caught up to us yet.
That $1,800 lawnmower it could be anything from lithium batteries, power mosfets, MCU etc it takes only one part outage to stop production. Semi lead-times are over a year.
A long term shortage would wipe out smaller businesses.

[Messtechniker]

With "could be worse" I mean the unavailability of parts for our central gas heating system, for example, which is pretty much essential. Maybe I should start collecting wood right now.

[tom66]

How could they be worse? Inflation is out of control, we've got a war going on trashing commodities/energy supplies and covid shutdowns in Shanghai at week 7. Next winter you will be quite cold.
The supply chain really is upside down and under more stress, those effects I don't think have caught up to us yet.
That $1,800 lawnmower it could be anything from lithium batteries, power mosfets, MCU etc it takes only one part outage to stop production. Semi lead-times are over a year.
A long term shortage would wipe out smaller businesses.

Inflation is hardly out of control.  It's 8% over the year, which is about 2.5x what it should be.  To quote Chernobyl, not great, not terrible.   

Out of control would be 8% in any given month.  Also while shortage of Russian gas may affect parts of Europe it will not affect the US, Canada, the UK or many European countries in fact. 

[SeanB]

It's amazing that with >100 years of experience building cars, Ford can still make n00b mistakes.   (I own 2 Fords, I like them!  - but I wouldn't buy a Bronco for a while...)

Problem is they dumped all the old designers, as they cost more to keep on the books, and decided to first hire all new designers, and shift all the design to cheaper countries, only leaving the top management as US based. Then wonder why they make all these mistakes again, because the new teams have no access to the old designs, and the old data about fixes, because that was all either in archives that were dumped, or stored in some deep unindexed warehouse, only there to be kept for regulatory purpose, and when the second the time is up they go into the shredder. So they make the same mistakes again and again, because nobody in the design teams is there for more than 2 model years, and they then either leave or transfer, with no knowledge being left behind.