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Comment by formerly_proven | Hacker News Reader

Currently working on a new design for a client, it's quite a pain. Lots of things, even mundane things like connectors and such are out of stock / low stock and usually quite a bit more expensive.

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Yep, similarly. We work with PLCs where the manufacturer normally has fairly deep stocks of all the PLC CPUs, expansion cards, etc - guaranteed part availability is one of the big selling points of using PLCs. Some things are still available but others are completely out, to the point where we're considering completely redesigning some of our smaller experimental projects around e.g. Raspberry Pis.

What we do when RPis stop being available is yet to be seen...

https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/20/raspberry_pi_supply_e...

rpi4 are already getting hard to find.

Repurposeable QuadCore ARM SOCs are fairly easy to find in the form of previous-gen Android TV Boxes, for fractions of the price of the RPI4. Some are weaker, some are slightly stronger, but in many embedded situation these do well enough.

I think that's already started to happen. I had to buy the Essentials kit this week because a standalone Pi was not available from any distributor, with lead times of up to a year.

I was looking to buy parallel EEPROMs (DIP) a couple days ago and found they were pretty expensive and mostly unavailable. I was wondering if that's because this type of IC is rather niche these days, or whether it's due to what's called the "chip shortage".

If anyone knows or has an educated opinion, please let me know...

It's a niche part and you shouldn't be surprised if it's discontinued soon. Think about migrating your design.

I'm starting to see end-of-life notices for a lot of parts that I wouldn't normally see at their age, but if they're low runners that would totally make sense.

If you see lead times longer than a year, that's your early warning.

I imagine one end result of this supply squeeze is that a lot of bespoke or legacy parts will be finally removed from designs that have up until now been "good enough". To cite the most common example, vehicle manufacturers' most common supply pain-point is ICs built on a ~200nm process, which was state of the art between 1996-2000.

I understand it makes sense to move slower for chips embedded in long-life devices, and they need additional validation; however, at some point if lead times are long enough and prices stay high it becomes reasonable to start that extended validation process on newer chips.

This would hopefully mean consumers start seeing infotainment with much better performance in the second half of 2022, and this lines up with industry expectations of when the squeeze will lift.

There are one to two multimedia SoCs in a car. There are hundreds to thousands of mixed-signal and power ASICs in a car. Those are on large nodes, not because they're outdated, but because that's what you use for power and mixed signal. TSMC N7 is great for that 2 GHz ARM quad-core SoC, but garbage when you need to drive a piezo fuel valve.

> To cite the most common example, vehicle manufacturers' most common supply pain-point is ICs built on a ~200nm process, which was state of the art between 1996-2000.

I'm a total layman, but that might be misunderstanding "state of the art." Larger feature sizes may be better for their applications if they allow the parts to be more reliable.

I meant the node itself was state of the art. The application reliability is important, but in practice will be balanced against cost of goods -- just like how consumer PCs use non-ECC memory and try to handle it in software (or just decide occasional crashes are acceptable), there would likely be additional failure compensation added in other areas to adjust for otherwise cheaper parts on a smaller process node.

And if you think a car company wouldn't use a less-reliable part because of safety concerns, look at the Pinto: Ford knew it had a tendency to, erm, explode, but calculated paying off lawsuits would be cheaper than fixing the problem. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...

Infotainment systems have multiple-year lead times and validating a PCB change can run just as long. Unless you're Tesla.

In DIP packages? I purchased a few EEPROMS and Flash parts from Digikey recently to fix a old industrial laser. I spent like $5 on the EEproms and something like $2.50 for the equivalent flash parts. I was trying to see if I could migrate the machine to flash as the parts were pin compatible and the laser uses battery backed SRAM for storage. Worked perfectly.

Probably because such ICs are rather niche indeed. Any way of re-architecting your system to use an SPI flash chip? If anything else fails, you could go the extreme route and get a microcontroller to "translate"...

Price gouging in most cases, supported by difficulties in transportation and customs. I work in manufacturing (not IT products) and this is what we see. Chip shortage is real, but not every single type of chip.

Had few surplus STM32 reels. Ebayed them for a few thousand bucks.

I can only imagined how much money did the people who envisaged the shortage early enough got from hoarding chips.

How are non-ICs in short-supply? Did I miss a whole story about supply chain problems or is it literally that overall demand has maxed out overall supply and most people don't have the means to increase production?

If you look at the various ports, the ships are waiting to enter so that they can offload.

There's a lack of shipping options available to get items to the US in the first place, that means that various bits and bobs necessary to manufacture a widget aren't available because they are stuck in a shipping container somewhere around the world and there is no available space to put it on a ship.

Yep outside of a few industries that have specific supply constraints (like semiconductors) the broad shortages are mostly due to the ports. They have zero room to absorb the additional demand thanks to the longshoreman unions having blocked all opportunities for automation and efficiency improvements over the past couple decades, so a record number of ships are waiting at anchor for many days if not weeks outside of major US ports.

Blaming failures on unions and employees' rights is a traditional excuse for US companies it seems.

We had parts shortages for a couple years now.

https://www.arrow.com/en/research-and-events/articles/capaci...

covid exacerbated the problem

Yes, you design for what you can order instead of ordering what's in your design.

Parts are going from in-stock to multi-year lead times within a single design iteration. uC's/passives/FPGAs/etc.

Yeah, this situation is quite frustrating.

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