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Since January of this year, I have been waiting for a certain MCU (STM32F042K6T6) to be available but still no luck. I get the bigger picture now: there's a shortage at the source. I have to move fast and secure a stock of the rest of the ICs, otherwise this supply-chain issue can be disastrous to small hardware companies.

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I'm convinced that, if in-person IEEE meetups were still a thing right now, you could drop a tray of ST Micro chips in the middle of the meeting and watch it devolve into a fistfight in seconds.

The chip shortage right now is rough.

We need thousands, and we need them in humidity-sealed trays. A handful thrown on a table isn't enough.

+1 for having to be sealed. We have a handful of companies wanting to sell us needed chips but they are odds and ends, not always packaged. Were always suspect.

You also can't expose parts to ambient humidity for very long if you intend to put them through a reflow solder process. Bad things happen.

Sure you can, you just need to low-temp bake them before reflow to get the moisture back out.

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