I understand why the new advanced chips could face shortages, but why are there shortages for these basic chips. Can’t they be made anywhere, and more easily?
Not really. Semiconductor fabs are built around "tools" from manufacturers like AMAT and Nikon. Those tool vendors make most of their money from selling new tools for fancy new processes, not supporting 20-year-old stuff. Eventually stuff breaks, and fabs have to offline these older processes.
The way this works in the tech industry is that "chips" are actually software, so if your old manufacturer isn't keeping up you resynthesize your VHDL or Verilog for a new fab, rev your board design or whatever, and keep going.
But other industries aren't so agile. They have older designs without design teams to support them, or even chip designs that they retain only as masks and not HDL. Those parts don't port cleanly to newer high-volume logic.
In my estimation these older parts that "just werk" should be getting inherited and iterated on as a public good.
The idea that means of production should phase into public trust tends to get everyone in a tizzy though. I'd like to see a public "foundry of last resort" that focuses on being able to make anything.
And Japanese almost as a rule have whack a good leasing, and service business, including replacement parts for close to 30 years old equipment.
Absolutely not. You just made this up.
Obviously many very old chips are out of production but not because the equipment broke down and was never repaired.
You're interpreting me pedantically while actually agreeing with my point, I think. Old processes don't have the capacity they used to[1]. If you don't like "stuff breaks" then how about "eventually the ROI on the equipment goes negative relative to the business so the line is idled and the fab real estate repurposed to make more profitable modern stuff." OK?
[1] Which, again, is just a "duh" kind of point and I can't believe we're arguing about it.
Secondly, some legacy manufacturers of semiconductor parts lost money on their capacity-building investments during the dot-com burst. The semiconductor industry is brutal and there is a genuine fear that overcapacity will make it hard to deal with any bust that happens after this boom.
This has all sorts of bizarre consequences. In the middle of the PPE shortage - hospitals prevented their employees from buying PPEs themselves but would still only buy PPEs at the lowest price with a long term contract. And you had the Texas company that loudly proclaimed they couldn't sell their PPEs but they also only sold by long term contract. And this was all with people dying.
It's easy to see how manufacturer isn't going to be adding capacity for a puny short-term shortage.
Almost like starting a "generics" business in pharma medication but for older chipsets.
I'm sure there's a great trade to be had in producing the lower end stuff.
The trouble is, this is a temporary shortage, so it makes no sense to spend serious cash (you're talking hundreds of millions) to make a new fab when the demand won't be there in a year or two.
While true, one could say it’s a bet on inflation to borrow dollars now for productive assets.
It isn't. Designs on 200mm were in dire shortage for half a decade, and Chinese foundries were making very decent money on decades old chips.
For the last 3-4 years, 200mm-180nm had a 12 month+ backlog across the whole market.
Tons of chips still made at >130nm, and 200mm equipment for simple reasons that companies don't make much money, or not having much volume in this stuff.
When a new process node comes out not all fabs are immediately upgraded. Fabs with older tech simply start producing simpler chips while the new ones pump out cutting edge ones.
Still, GloFo basically made this their plan, when they pivoted from the very highest-end chipmaking into FD-SOI, which is less performant but cheaper to design for.
Google and efabless accept submissions every few months for designs that use a free 130nm process development kit:
https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program
130nm is plenty ancient; it's the same feature size as a >10-year-old STM32F1, I think. And I hear that those MPW runs are starting to accept ~$10K for a guaranteed spot with a closed-source design.
So you'd probably be looking at charging 6 figures per wafer. I don't have good insight into startup costs, but I would guess high 8-low 10 figures. Running costs would not be negligible either.
Is that possible? I haven't crunched the numbers and I don't have enough information or context to do so accurately. But my gut says that it might depend on how many billionaires you're on good terms with.
130nm is quite ancient, but there are digital parts from early nineties still on the market. They are way bigger than 130nm.
Right now I have an ongoing project with a company making aircons. Their kit supplier uses a really, really ancient, and rare Hitachi MCU made on 600nm, and they are paying few dollars for it — more than some modern ARM SoCs.
They really want to change their kit supplier, or compel the chip supplier to cut cost, but the kit supplier itself can't migrate from Hitachi MCU because they don't have firmware sources as they themselves only copypasted the firmware as a binary for decades..
That’s seems like a rather existential problem. If I’m understanding correctly, the kit supplier makes the control board and the manufacturer does final assembly?
The one I talk about has a kilobyte of ROM, and is an original SuperH from early nineties.
That is absolutely not true.
> Almost like starting a "generics" business in pharma medication but for older chipsets.
There is actually a great interest in this business, but mainly from Chinese. World's biggest 200mm fab is in Shanghai. A decision to build a brand new 200mm fab would've never flew in the West.
Chinese 3rd-4th-n-th tier fabs been vacuuming the market for old equipment for last 5 years.
> I'm sure there's a great trade to be had in producing the lower end stuff.
At this very moment, production on 150mm-200mm wafers is actually few times more profitable than on the latest process because everybody is now ready to pay absolutely ridiculous premiums.
These systems are also usually integrated with other systems to provide additional functionality using largely custom code that somewhat prevents quick iteration and code reuse, especially since the people writing the code are largely not in-house but various contractors (that's where a company like Tesla has the upper hand since I suppose that they control the software stack a lot more than the average).
Beyond that these systems suffer heavily from design-by-committee and worse yet, committees whose core competence really isn't computer UI.
Then you have to consider that IC designs are usually easier to reuse since they're more flexible, if you can have a single design with different firmwares for your entire line of products vs custom hardware for every design. Even if you sell 700k units/year you probably have a few models in your inventory, each selling for a fraction of that.
Beyond that it's pretty common for modern appliances to come with so-called "smart" features that require more processing and more IO capabilities. It's not rare for modern coffee makers to come with a color screen instead of the good old 7 segment displays.
So really the equation is not that simple, especially for higher end models that will have a more expensive BoM overall and a lower number of units sold.
Personally my take away from that was “what is a smart toaster and why would anyone need that”.
F--- t---- m-----.