How is Chipageddon affecting you?

[coppice]

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.

I remember arguments like that in the 70s in the UK. Then suddenly inflation was 30%, and people were still trying to claim it wasn't out of control. Now we look back to a 1000 pound salary from 1970, and wonder how anyone could live on that. They could. It was a liveable wage at that time. By the end of the 70s you needed 5000 to live as well.

[MadScientist]

Bizarrely at the moment STmicros evaluation boards for high side switches are cheaper ( by 30% ) then the part itself. I see some desoldering in my future

[coppice]

Perhaps the lockdowns in China will ease the supply of parts in western markets. It seems the semiconductor makers with a big market in China are getting hammered right now. Of course, if you are a western company, but assemble all your stuff in China, things are probably worse right now.

[T3sl4co1l]

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$ !

"Popular" so ATMEGA324P and ATTINY85?  Not so surprising, I guess.

Plenty of XMEGAs last I checked, I think, though maybe not any particular one you might need.  Or want, 'cuz I mean, XMEGAs...

AVR-Dx however, cheap and plentiful.  But again, if it's not what you're looking for, or can't afford the time to port over to it.

That said, Arduino I think supports 128DA64 or DB or something now, so there's that.

Tim

[Kasper]

I signed up for a bunch of stock notifications over the last year and I think this raspberry pi is the first one that came back.  It included this note that I should hurry.

"Your requested product(s) are now back in stock. Stock levels are changing constantly so please be quick so you don't miss out!"

Email was sent at 12:01 and now at 8:22, they're gone.  Next batch in 11/12/23 whatever that means.

[Howardlong]

I may live to regret saying this, but for the first time in a couple of years I haven't had to go out to brokers to fulfil a BOM.

Yesterday I gritted my teeth with one remaining part which wasn't available from usual distributers, and reluctantly placed an order with serial bait & switch rip off merchants Win-Source.

Then today that part's suddenly appeared on TI inventory. So, when Win-source finally deign to respond to me in a week's time with their usual bullsh!t that the part advertised at $2.50 is now $8, I'll be more than delighted to tell them to go **** themselves.

[free_electron]

Bizarrely at the moment STmicros evaluation boards for high side switches are cheaper ( by 30% ) then the part itself. I see some desoldering in my future

read this : https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/21/asm_ceo_industrial_conglomerate_buying/

now they are buying washing machines to strip them for parts ...

[Kasper]

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.

I remember arguments like that in the 70s in the UK. Then suddenly inflation was 30%, and people were still trying to claim it wasn't out of control. Now we look back to a 1000 pound salary from 1970, and wonder how anyone could live on that. They could. It was a liveable wage at that time. By the end of the 70s you needed 5000 to live as well.

8% based on CPI aka CP-lie?

In Canada, average mortgage payments went 2x in the last 2 years.  Average house price went up 2x in the last 6 years.  I did a lot of renos to my house and it went up 2.5x in the last 6 years.  So 2x from inflation, 0.5x from real improvements.

About 25% of our currency was created (counterfeited by the BOC (bank of Canada)) in the last 2 years.  The BOC was telling Canadians interest rates will stay low for a very very long time.  In housing terms, a long time is 30 years.  They also said interest rates wouldn't start rising until end of 2023.  Now, interest rates are rising at record pace because the BOC admits inflation is out of control.

[HwAoRrDk]

read this : https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/21/asm_ceo_industrial_conglomerate_buying/

now they are buying washing machines to strip them for parts ...

I guess if you are making an "industrial module" that sells in very low quantity but high price (i.e. 5-figure+), given a lack of any other sources, it is worth it to buy a $300 washing machine and rip the chip out of it. Their profit margin is probably big enough to be able to afford to do that. Seems like an awful waste, though. I hope they're responsibly disposing of the rest of the washing machine. Perhaps their engineers are making a little beer money selling the remaining parts on eBay.

Wonder how they found out that the chip they need is used in a certain model/brand of washing machine? Was it serendipitous, or did someone tip them off?

[floobydust]

Official inflation numbers are always a joke. My household expenses for groceries, gasoline, natural gas, electricity - just the basics y-o-y are up 30%, some have doubled. How about wages, are they up?

STMicroelectronics Reports 2022 First Quarter Financial Results 18% revenue growth, the party is going great. But STM32's only 1% of the variants are in stock, that is 28/2,802 parts at Digi-Key. So ST is only feeding the big fish, screw everyone else.

[BravoV]

Official inflation numbers are always a joke. My household expenses for groceries, gasoline, natural gas, electricity - just the basics y-o-y are up 30%, some have doubled. How about wages, are they up?

Just wait until the coming winter, especially if it turns out to be really-really cold , as today the natural gas price already increased > 140% year on year, expecting another tsunami hitting the industry, home heating and the most vulnerable, the currency value for those who needs the gas to run their economy/industry.

No, the narrative of ditching gas or oil or even coal will NOT be possible say even in 3 years with the best superhuman effort.

[SiliconWizard]

Real-life inflation (so daily expenses) in at least a large part of the western world is now around 20% to 30% indeed. I second floobydust for my case, it's jumped between +20% to +30%.
And apparently, it's just the beginning?

Yes, things are actually getting worse than during the pandemic.

[BravoV]

Real-life inflation (so daily expenses) in at least a large part of the western world is now around 20% to 30% indeed. I second floobydust for my case, it's jumped between +20% to +30%.
And apparently, it's just the beginning?

You may not agree on this analysis, but I find this discussion is really interesting and eyes opener, especially for EU countries and UK.

[IDEngineer]

Real-life inflation (so daily expenses) in at least a large part of the western world is now around 20% to 30% indeed. I second floobydust for my case, it's jumped between +20% to +30%.

As I've said before...

I'm no economist but I believe this is just the overall economic system correcting itself after decades of artificial manipulation. As the old saying goes, "You cannot fool Mother Nature". You cannot inject gobs of fresh currency into the economy and NOT have inflation. Like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you may be able to make things appear different for a while but the fundamentals always assert themselves eventually.

Speaking for the USA, we injected gobs of money into the system back in the 2008-2009 "Great Recession" period yet the Fed held rates down to prevent prices from reacting normally. I bet someone somewhere thought that would be a short-term action, but no politician wants to be in office when the piper must be paid so they simply maintained the fiction! Thus for 12+ years we've been kicking that can down the road.

Then along comes COVID-19, and the novel, unique, unprecedented "solution" is... wait for it... print more money! And it appears that this, at last, has reached the breaking point. The fiction can no longer be maintained. All that pent-up correction, those years of artificial conditions, are asserting themselves. The fundamental fact is we've dramatically increased the number of dollars in the system. By definition each individual dollar must be worth less as a result. I'm not talking zero-sum game here - even as the economy has grown, the growth in the number of dollars has far outstripped it. It's not the absolute number of dollars, it's the ratio of dollars to the size of the economy. The politicians have played games with the numbers so much, for so long, that it may finally be escaping their ability to manipulate things.

What I don't know is the proper response for "the little people" like me and (I presume) most of the participants here. If you know inflation is getting worse, holding currency is obviously the wrong way to protect your wealth. But what hard assets are a good alternative? Real estate is obviously in a huge bubble so "buying at the peak" is an awful way to preserve your asset base. Just play the stock and bond market? Buy up canned goods and ammunition? I really don't know. But what I do suspect is that what we're seeing here is a long overdue reaction/correction to an economically unwarranted flood of fresh dollars into the economy. Unless they pull those dollars back out of the economy, the market will revalue each individual dollar to compensate.

[tom66]

I remember arguments like that in the 70s in the UK. Then suddenly inflation was 30%, and people were still trying to claim it wasn't out of control. Now we look back to a 1000 pound salary from 1970, and wonder how anyone could live on that. They could. It was a liveable wage at that time. By the end of the 70s you needed 5000 to live as well.

So, what's the real rate of inflation?  Where do you get this data from?

According to the ONS, who are arms-length independent from the UK government, it's around 6%.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/l55o/mm23

But pray tell me the actual inflation rate, with sources, please...

[coppice]

I remember arguments like that in the 70s in the UK. Then suddenly inflation was 30%, and people were still trying to claim it wasn't out of control. Now we look back to a 1000 pound salary from 1970, and wonder how anyone could live on that. They could. It was a liveable wage at that time. By the end of the 70s you needed 5000 to live as well.

So, what's the real rate of inflation?  Where do you get this data from?

According to the ONS, who are arms-length independent from the UK government, it's around 6%.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/l55o/mm23

But pray tell me the actual inflation rate, with sources, please...

I have no strong reason to doubt that for the particular set of figures they measure inflation with the rate may well be 7% or so. What made you thing I doubted them? The thing is when inflation jumps it has a habit of not stopping at 8%. That blip in 1991 on the ONS graph was a government induced surge, resulting from utter government stupidity, that was a one off event. It crashed the economy so badly it rapidly drove all the inflation out of the system. I, and a lot of other engineers, left the UK at that point.

If the current situation persists people will demand more pay, and the inflation cycle will really take off. In the 70s the government bought into this, by mandating that employers keep increasing pay as inflation went up. It might sound mean not to do this, but it just fuels the cycle of instability. At least in the 1970s they had, and used, the option of massive interest rates to eventually bring down inflation, but they left it very late for fear of crashing the economy. The result was they damaged the economy anyway. Now interest rates have been so low for so long, it has fuelled things like a massive rise in house prices. If they try to increase interest rates significantly a lot of people will default on mortgage payments that are way above their income. Far more than happened in 1991. It could make houses as cheap as in 1992, though. There were some fantastic bargains around that year.

[Kasper]

I remember arguments like that in the 70s in the UK. Then suddenly inflation was 30%, and people were still trying to claim it wasn't out of control. Now we look back to a 1000 pound salary from 1970, and wonder how anyone could live on that. They could. It was a liveable wage at that time. By the end of the 70s you needed 5000 to live as well.

So, what's the real rate of inflation?  Where do you get this data from?

According to the ONS, who are arms-length independent from the UK government, it's around 6%.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/l55o/mm23

But pray tell me the actual inflation rate, with sources, please...

There is no actual inflation rate.  It is different for every person.  People who drink apple juice will experience different inflation than people who drink orange juice.  CP-lie expects people to choose which-ever juice is cheapest.

Inflation benefits people who's income comes from assets and hurts people who's income comes from employment.

Economists who create the mechanisms to control and measure inflation are often in the prior category and voters are often in the latter category.  This creates an incentive for inflation to be under-reported.

[tom66]

I have no strong reason to doubt that for the particular set of figures they measure inflation with the rate may well be 7% or so. What made you thing I doubted them? The thing is when inflation jumps it has a habit of not stopping at 8%. That blip in 1991 on the ONS graph was a government induced surge, resulting from utter government stupidity, that was a one off event. It crashed the economy so badly it rapidly drove all the inflation out of the system. I, and a lot of other engineers, left the UK at that point.

OK.  That's good to know.  I might have been triggered by someone else telling me inflation was really 40% year on year and no one seems to have noticed... except for the fact that I certainly haven't noticed prices going up THAT much!

The problem with economists (and the wider public commenting on economic systems) is we're really good at predicting crashes that never happen.   Economic systems are chaotic: long term trends are predictable, but crashes are extremely hard -- possibly impossible -- to predict with any certainty.  Economists have predicted 30 of the last two great recessions, after all.    There's no fundamental reason to believe this inflationary peak is any different than any other noise that we've seen before.   Whilst things are getting more expensive, a lot of that is driven by high demand coming out of COVID.  There's certainly no shortage of employment for instance, unemployment has never been this low since pre 1975 (for the UK, but the situation is true for most of the world.)

Property prices are unlikely to come crashing down in any meaningful way, as since the 2008 crash mortgages have been underwritten with limited salary-to-loan ratios and a stress test at 8% base rate.  (Which would roughly scale every mortgage repayment, that was not fixed, by 2.5x.)  I don't doubt the issue of central banks holding interest rates close to zero for a decade has created a headache of where to go after COVID.  It meant that we couldn't effectively stimulate the economy when a crisis like COVID came on and were left to just bailing out and handing out money like candy. 

[Kasper]

[...]
What I don't know is the proper response for "the little people" like me and (I presume) most of the participants here. If you know inflation is getting worse, holding currency is obviously the wrong way to protect your wealth. But what hard assets are a good alternative? Real estate is obviously in a huge bubble so "buying at the peak" is an awful way to preserve your asset base. Just play the stock and bond market? Buy up canned goods and ammunition? I really don't know. But what I do suspect is that what we're seeing here is a long overdue reaction/correction to an economically unwarranted flood of fresh dollars into the economy. Unless they pull those dollars back out of the economy, the market will revalue each individual dollar to compensate.

Might be a good time to start selling sweaters and tea.  I think those could become popular as heating costs increase.  I'm going to focus accepting my meager hourly wage for a bit longer while I renovate my house after-hours and sit on the sidelines of the real estate business for a bit.  I'd like to be ready to get a deal if the rug-pull comes to fruition.

[cdev]

Britons are vastly underestimating the cost of healthcare in the futrure.. And since they sell health insurance, there wont be any way to go on having a NHS alongside it.

So its going to become very expensive, if somebody has any kind of income at all.

I remember arguments like that in the 70s in the UK. Then suddenly inflation was 30%, and people were still trying to claim it wasn't out of control. Now we look back to a 1000 pound salary from 1970, and wonder how anyone could live on that. They could. It was a liveable wage at that time. By the end of the 70s you needed 5000 to live as well.

So, what's the real rate of inflation?  Where do you get this data from?

According to the ONS, who are arms-length independent from the UK government, it's around 6%.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/timeseries/l55o/mm23

But pray tell me the actual inflation rate, with sources, please...

There is no actual inflation rate.  It is different for every person.  People who drink apple juice will experience different inflation than people who drink orange juice.  CP-lie expects people to choose which-ever juice is cheapest.

Inflation benefits people who's income comes from assets and hurts people who's income comes from employment.

Economists who create the mechanisms to control and measure inflation are often in the prior category and voters are often in the latter category.  This creates an incentive for inflation to be under-reported.

[Howardlong]

Regarding my post #980 on the TI part, I’ve seen their inventory go up and down and then up again dramatically today.

At one stage it was showing rapidly dwindling stocks soince my purchase yesterday but a couple of thousand available so I tried to buy 500 of them to keep stocks up, but the website threw a wobbly and complained about there being No availability despite the stock showing.

Then it went back up again to about 7ku, so I bought some successfully.

I am wondering if their strategy is to drip inventory into their system in an attempt to stave off the unscrupulous speculators.

[IDEngineer]

Regarding my post #980 on the TI part, I’ve seen their inventory go up and down and then up again dramatically today.

We used to buy reels straight from TI.com. But last time they sent us a notification that "your part is back in stock!", we tried to buy a reel and they were limiting quantities to 50 pieces.

FIFTY PIECES?!? C'mon, if you usually buy reels 50 pieces ain't gonna cut it. They had plenty of stock, but they wouldn't sell you any sort of reasonable quantity.

[IDEngineer]

Britons are vastly underestimating the cost of healthcare in the futrure.. And since they sell health insurance, there wont be any way to go on having a NHS alongside it.

It's fascinating to watch the disconnect of the people in the USA who point at the UK system as the "ideal end goal". They must not read the British press nor speak to anyone living there.

Same with Canada. "Technically" they have full medical coverage but our friends who are born-and-raised citizens speak of lengthy delays for the most basic services, etc. Not a single positive comment ever.

I'm open to new ideas, but why would anyone want to copy systems whose supposed beneficiaries speak so poorly of them? We should be learning from their mistakes and (maybe) doing something different.

[IDEngineer]

Might be a good time to start selling sweaters and tea.  I think those could become popular as heating costs increase.

If all the gloom and doom comes to pass, I suspect lower latitudes will become even more popular. Beyond about 45 degrees north or south latitude artificial heating is not a luxury, it's a requirement for several months of each year. Air conditioning is a relatively recent invention, humans survived for a very long time without the ability to artificially chill their living spaces. Avoiding extreme cold is much more important than avoiding extreme heat.

[EEVblog]

Two Keysight winners from my draw 12 months ago have just received their scope and function gen!
Chipageddon is real and Keysight are suffering big time. They said FPGA's and PSU parts are hardest hit.