The challenge with automotive parts is reliability and performance over extended temperature and humidity range.
This is not necessarily something you are just good at because you already produce semis.
This is not necessarily something you are just good at because you already produce semis.
The military has been using automotive grade parts to reduce costs where possible.
https://www.dla.mil/Portals/104/Documents/LandAndMaritime/V/...
Auto manufacturers need 380nm production lines.
They unwisely canceled all their orders for >6 months.
Their suppliers mothballed all these antiquated facilities.
Maybe Intel can make money with this. It will be interesting to see.
These guys hate inventory with a raging passion.
Efficiency and Robustness are very often a tradeoff, the more efficient you are, the more prone your entire operation is to minor disruptions.
Something akin to overfitting in machine learning.
Also something to consider is what happens when the entire economy is forced in that direction, where you either cut everything to the bone for the sake of efficiency, or go out of business due to competition.
The longer the lag between producing a faulty part and trying to use it, the harder to diagnose the problem.
The analogous software problem is probably having database backups sitting around without regularly testing if you can successfully restore from them.
And I really wished I the "everything is running on JIT" meme to die. Because it is just plain wrong.
That sounds like a contractor milking a cost-plus contract.
I don't know why someone would agree to them, but they're fairly common. Nasa awarded Boeing a cost-plus contract for the SLS.
Basically they're awarded a contract for the cost estimate plus any overruns, it's basically a blank check.
The problems are, that they stock to much of some parts and not enough from others. That problems gets worse when programs reach end of life, obsolescence is a severe problem then.
Most of the demand fluctuations in aerospace, less so for spares, is home made. Delivery lead times and production lead times are so long, that done right, fluctuations are mainly a problem for long lead time items. And that is manageable.
Overall, each of the projects had around 2000 unique parts (at least for what this particular plant was making). Occasionally, newer contracts would get a much higher prioritization and could grab parts (and employees) from older projects. Another scenario that would lead to extra demand was having test failures on a project that was nearing design freeze.
I ended up changing industries to financial services, but will always have a deep respect and appreciation for what went into those projects.
Overall I felt like there were a number of good strategies but that sometimes the strategizing interfered with the execution. Peoples tenure and the projects they went through often influenced their notion of ideal. By the time I started getting comfortable understanding these things, it was time to get a new job.
Is there a reason for that? I would imagine they'd have actuarials telling them exactly how much of each thing they need to produce a thing, as well as failure rates.
In the end, it is the tram and person responsible for inventory planning and placing production / purchase orders that set, directly and indirectly, inventory levels. In some cases 2 months maybe just right. In other cases it maybe 1 month to much, in again other cases not close to enough. And that can change over time.
As a rule of thumb, you don't want inventory. It makes an operation inflexible and fat. You need it so. Figuring that out is the task planners and supply chain managers. Some orgs are better at that then others.
They "need" chips made on a 28 year old process? I'd really want a source for this. Even if it were true, there are still fabs that can make .35um process chips.
RAD6000 CPUs are still made on 0.5um fabs.
Whos to say the full process to swap out a handful of chips within the car and getting any required tests and certifications done wouldn't take as long or longer than waiting for the next production run of the spec'd chips?
I think you mean 350nm.
This isn't surprising; a lot of nifty features got axed after 350nm, like having two full-fledged polysilicon layers (a few subsequent processes technically have two poly layers but one of them is totally crippled and can only be used for flash cells).
The suppliers didn't mothball the facilities (which are not at all antiquated, and are massively in use for other things), they just sold that capacity to less capricious customers.
I couldn't resist. The joke was just too easy.
LOL. Any code that relies on fast interrupts is a lost cause on x86. A 32 MHz ECU may dramatically faster at interrupts that a top of the line Xeon :)
The power consumption of a pile of Xeons will add up fast, too.