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Comment by swamp40 | Hacker News Reader

I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs.

They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers).

I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps.

I don't even know where they all went. It's not like you need a TSMC slot to make a FET.

And whatever you look up, Chinese brokers have 10K-50K pieces of them for $25 each. Don't know what to think of that, either.

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It's my current living nightmare. Endless treadmill of:

1. Our contract manufacturer calls in a panic no longer able to obtain/was shorted on a shipment of part XYZ. XYZ is increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts like MOSFETS, oscillators, to slightly-more-complicated but not "fancy" stuff like serial transceivers, USB stuff, NOR flash, load switches. TI is the bane of my existence currently.

2. Search for a drop-in or near drop-in replacement. There are none, because that's what everyone's doing.

3. Search for alternative designs. Maybe the component is in distributor's stock (Digikey, Mouser, Newark, etc), maybe it's not.

4. Test the alternative design. By the time I receive parts, prototype, test, guess what? Can't get those parts anymore. Go back to step #2.

5. Fall behind on all of my other NPD responsibilities. Stress, burnout, acceptance. Lament not going into another engineering field. Feel bad about my midwest metro area compensation in comparison to a bunch of Silicon Valley SWEs on website.

6. GOTO #1

> increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts

I can't even get cables anymore. Or connectors. It's an insane situation, and the company I work for isn't built to manage this level of churn in our products. How do you support customers when equipment BOMs change every week? We just can't keep up.

I'm involved with pneumatic connector manufacturing, and we had trouble for awhile getting raw aluminum at any price to make them. At one point we had to buy 3" aluminum bar and use our lathe to turn it down to the size we actually needed (mostly a mix of 2" and 2.5") causing a insane amount of aluminum and time to be wasted (yes the scrap is recycled, but its worth 1/10 of it in bar form). During this it was tempting to tell customers placing orders that if they want their parts faster than 3 months, they need to send us raw aluminum so we can actually make their order.

For some of the other "jelly bean" parts we need (o-rings, snap rings, etc) we are looking at making them in-house, but both the raw materials and machinery to make them are not possible to get. We could spend the next few months making our own machines to fabricate them, but without being able to source steel and various rubbers any more reliably than the finished goods, there isn't much point.

At this point, its tempting to try and raise capital to start mining and smelting aluminum, steel and buy an oil well and small refinery so we can ensure we have the materials needed to keep production smooth.

Companies used to do that before the leveraged-buyout / MBA / private-equity ridiculousness started. I think...Youngstown Tube Co had its own mines, called "captive mines" dedicated just to making metal for them. That's where captive insurance got its name.

Your OODA loop is way too long. We buy ALL the parts immediately, within 10 minutes of finding something. If they don't work, it's a loss.

On new designs, I find a part in stock, we order ALL we need for the next year, and THEN I make a footprint and put it in the design. For EVERY SINGLE PART. Starting with the IC's. It actually works quite nicely once you get used to it. Obviously, there are some losses there too - just the cost of doing business in these crazy times.

Wish my slow corporate behemoth would support this, but they are the opposite of agile.

It's also gotten to the point where there doesn't exist enough stock in distribution to buy a year's worth. And I'm not talking high volume, maybe 1k/year to 50k/year. Distributors are constantly decommitting from orders, broker stock is drying up, etc

It is surprising how easily companies will fund this change in buying habits when the entire company's existence depends on it. The CEO needs to have a come-to-Jesus moment though.

We've spent several hundred thousand at "Win Source" broker in China, and haven't had a problem yet (knock on wood). We X-ray and test to verify though.

Mostly, Chinese brokers are a den of thieves/a pool of sharks. If they can counterfeit it, they do. Use a credit card to help with clawing your money back in case of fraud. And never ever buy IC's from Amazon or Ebay. Those are ALL fake.

The shortage of electronic components will continue for a long time, and a professional partner who only sells genuine products is particularly important.

That doesn't work for new designs when the parts are simply not available.

Next-level business plan: become a chip reseller for all the parts you didn't use. The prices are only going up.

Isn't this just contributing to the problem? I mean it's like toilet paper in the pandemic. But of course, if you're in business what choice to you have?

>>If they don't work, it's a loss.

Don't you find that they can be resold? Surely there's someone desperately looking for the parts you find unusable, but would fit their needs...

New Craigslist category for semiconductors?

It's not TSMC capacity that's the problem. It's the large nodes that make everything except cutting-edge processors. Nobody builds a new large-node fab, but demand for large node components keeps rising.

You nailed it. Most chips you use everyday come from the large node fabs. Maybe we should build some more.

Demand for semiconductors only recently exploded. In 2016, annual growth suddenly tripled for a few years. It's hard to know if this rate of growth is sustainable, or if it will fall back to "normal" again soon.

It was predicted though. There are many roadmaps predicting the increase in use of semiconductor sensors (trillion sensors roadmap) etc.

lol did that one Renesas fab with the fire make literally every damn semiconductor in the world that wasn't a CPU or GPU?

Sure seems like it. I was hoping to see if anyone knew the root of the problem, but if they do they aren't talking.

A big part of it is increased demand caused by the disruptions themself: a lot of companies are now stocking to have enough to run production for the whole year, while otherwise they'd order just-in-time. That causes further reduced availability, which causes more companies to stock up, repeat ad infinitum.

It's a good theory, but I don't know how to prove it. Of course that's one cause. I'm concerned there are also cascading material shortage problems that have clogged up the system and may be preventing deliveries. I suspect NXP lost their 2022 fab slot for Kinetis micros, but no one is talking. Just delivery dates of late 2023. How many others did that happen to? Why? I am concerned China might be flexing their muscles by shutting down Shenzhen, and maybe they have been flexing their muscles for a year now. I am concerned there is a tipping point that we are close to, where it ALL just falls apart.

I don't have insider information or anything, but I'm convinced that packaging is a huge part of the problem. There are many more wafer fabs than packaging houses, packaging hits high-volume low-margin parts much harder, and everyone routes through the same (lowest cost...) houses in the same tropical low-wage countries because packaging dice is basically a commodity service.

Except that now there isn't enough capacity to go around.

Switched-mode power supplies (SMPS) are eating components at an alarming rate. The increase in high-efficiency DC and battery-powered products has really changed that market.

shouldn't these shortages lead to older equipment/processes being dusted off and brought back online?

7nm or whatever state-of-the art processes may be important for certain latest electronics, but I'm guessing there are many components that could use 10 year-old or more semiconductor fabrication processes.

ive been trying to find some power mosfets to certain specs for a BOM for.. over a year!

A year? It seems like you should have been able to come up with something within a year? Unless it's an exotic or you have tight targets for cost or supplier qualification.

If you're willing to share the original part number, I'm curious as to what FET could cause so much grief.

Yup, same where I work. We are chasing down the smallest components too.

What are crosses?

It's short for "cross-references", which in the context of parts means "alternate parts".

Thanks!

I had your exact same problem a few weeks ago trying to get P-channel FETs and ended up with the SI2301CDS-T1-E3 which Mouser has just 143 left (which you can't believe).

Same with USB-UART bridges; zip, nada, nothing. I found some Cypress parts a few weeks ago, and I should consider myself lucky.

I won't order PCB until I have all reels of parts on my desk.

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