Western Digital says contamination impacting production at Japanese facilities
reuters.com
reuters.com
The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped.
I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started shorting out the electronics.
I can believe "scrapped."
Seems like one should look for a different solution
> The Copy Exactly! methodology focuses on matching the manufacturing site to the development site. Matching occurs at all levels for physical inputs and statistically-matched responses (outputs). This process enables continuous matching over time by using coordinated changes, audits, process control systems, and joint Fab management structures
But apart from that, I think we got the impression that there were some market positioning issues too. Like, in the US, Wal-Mart has a reputation for being the absolute cheapest, so Target being the "step up" option is a pretty reasonable place to be. Whereas in Canada, Wal-Mart was already occupying that step-up space (relative to discount department stores like Giant Tiger and the old Zellers locations that Target Canada bought up), and those overseeing the Target push hadn't really committed on whether they wanted to fight Wal-Mart directly for that space, or try to go a level further up and take on the "nice" department stores like the Bay and Sears.
Neither option was great, given that Wal-Mart was well-entrenched and the nice department stores having been dying for decades anyway. But not choosing a path at all is often worse than either of two bad options might have been if they'd at least been fully committed-to.
This is a fascinating read I bookmarked at the time :)
http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...
I believe (but could be wrong) Home Depot did essentially the same thing - used Canadian market as test bed for SAP, except they already had an established stable presence here.
Ignore the red herring title: https://semianalysis.com/is-intel-shipping-tools-out-of-us-f...
And you called out their near-infinite ability to be spread around.
Very useful and interesting class of chemicals.
It's a common process used to coat all sorts of objects. But you don't buy "powder coating paint" and use it yourself, it is done in purpose built facilities.
Working in Communications/Medical/Aerospace manufacturing, this is a MASSIVE concern.
Poor manufacturing process? (Of course poor is relative in today's silicon) Sabotage? Earthquake? (They have them all the time) Radiation from Fukushima? (Maybe a bit late 10 years after)
In poetic terms - a hundred thousand tiny demons got loose in the plant, and each and every one of them will need to be laboriously exorcised, before production can resume.
A 5% target miss in ~2018 triggered the avalanche of NAND price. So 1% isn't insignificant.
Reads like NAND chips marketed as Kioxia BiCS4.
1: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/western-d...
For example 40% of "Brand X" SSD drives might have WD chips, 40% Toshiba chips, and 20% Samsung chips so the manufacturer can get a better price and/or diversify supply. If WD can only supply 25% next quarter orders to Toshiba and Samsung will increase. That will naturally push prices up to some degree.
Manufacturers of commodity parts like storage or LCD panels are infamous for price fixing and gouging. All the disasters are great excuse for unjustified price hikes.
I remember how a decade ago I was building my PC and HDD prices were painful.
now let's build our new plants in LA, that'll help a lot in the future :D
dumb western politicians are responsible of the current situation, shame on them for sacrificingmany generations of future asian-dependent citizens
https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/01/22/intels-silicon-valley...
The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used in phones and computers are different from those used in cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury or even death. Car chips are built to totally different standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you need to manually check that everything still works out.
I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla was literally double the price.
The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars, the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have been literally selling their dashboards to richer people, because they now are crazy expensive.
Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the government to give them money.
Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip shortage made trucks get crazy expensive.
The government also was going to switch the machines used for voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage.
The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is literally disrupting production, changing products, changing people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the leader of 250 million people is chosen!
Say you need your truck fixed. It may take months to get the parts needed.
This hasn't played out yet, not even close.
As far as parts availability, I see just as many trucks on the road as ever. If it were widespread that it took months to fix trucks, there would be a huge impact. There’s not.
Do you have actual proof of what you’re talking about?
How so?
Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement.
Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a replacement if your router just got fried by lightning.
And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage going on.