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Comment by valdiorn | Hacker News Reader

So, can someone explain to me why I can't get ANY chips for anything at all? Everything is out of stock that I use in my designs (Audio processing equipment). microprocessors, microcontrollers, ADCs, DACs, audio codecs, memory. Even bread and butter diodes were hard to source a few months ago. You name it, Mouser/Farnell/Digikey/the manufacturer doesn't have it. And if they do, it's priced at 500% MSRP.

It may be "swinging the other way" but we're at the very depth of the curve right now, and lead times are frequently 12-18 months. I can't see any evidence that it's swinging back, personally, maybe someone else does (like the writer of this article).

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I'm a ham radio guy who builds his own radios and a time nut.

For some of the designs that I'm building for clubs and amateur rocket clubs, my chip prices have gone from $3 to $60/chip. I've been able to get by with the stock of chips that I keep for repairs, but, to find chips in the price points that I generally work with (and by price point, I mean, I donate these to clubs/college rocket clubs at no cost, so, I try to keep my costs as low as my sanity/bom/weight permits), I've been finding chips that have 1/4 of the ram or 1/4 the functionality that I need, and reworking my code around the new limitations of what I can build with.

Thank the EE gods that I can get boards from China in about 3-5 days at a relatively sane price point: add in an open source pick and place system (OpenPnP) and a easy-bake reflow oven (hacked together from a freebie on craigslist) and it allows me to iterate over designs about once every two weeks or so, as long as I've got everything in stock. I've had to change my boards for the SI4467 (Sub Ghz RF Transceiver from Silicon Labs) three or four times in the last year alone. I find something that works, build another one, I'm out of stock on an item with no availability in sight on DigiKey/Mouser, so, it's botch wiring and praying that I can get it to work the way I want to until I refab my PCB, and then rinse, repeat.

Check out the post by Schiit Audio's CEO (I think CEO?): https://www.head-fi.org/threads/schiit-happened-the-story-of...

It looks like the audio sector was hit particularly hard by the war in Ukraine.

I was absolutely confused regarding what kind of “tubes” this guy talks about. But when I saw 6N1P and recognized it immediately. Not the exact name, but the numbering scheme - each owner of a Russian TV would learn a numbering scheme for “tubes” sooner or later.

It’s interesting that Russia became (or remained as) an almost single supplier of this “outdated” technology.

But still, these “tubes” are rather a niche product in the audio equipment market, no? We probably can’t get a good enough insight looking just at them.

Not as niche as you think, it's a decent sized market segment with guitar amps.

> I was absolutely confused regarding what kind of “tubes” this guy talks about.

In Russian these are called “lamps”, not “tubes”.

Very different areas of semi. The Economist article is focused on the high end, most advanced nodes and their fabless users like AMD, NVidia.

What you list is either analog of older nodes (~90 to 40nm). It's a very different world, with often different players. TSMC plays in the digital old nodes, but as I understand is not very motivated in investing in much new capacity, and try to push customers toward 22nm ULP (may work for some, but not all). Others are investing, but it takes time.

So you start to see a glut at the high end, but still constraints in the analog / old nodes.

Intel's Ohio plant, mentioned in the article, is going to be focused on larger-node processes, not the ultra-high end like you mention.

When it comes to audio, it didn't help that AKM had a factory go up in flames[1], completely destroying most of it. It seems they've managed to shift production of some popular ADCs and DACs to other manufacturers[2] recently.

As for other chips, part of it is the toilet paper effect. From what I've heard, companies are buying 5x or 10x what they normally buy, just to be sure they got parts for production. Since the situation is still bad, I'm guessing people are still doing it.

Especially ICs are made in batches, so once it runs dry the manufacturer can't just print out another 10k units, they got other stuff lined up. I see for STM32s a lot of stock is expected at the end of this year or first half of next year, which lines up with what their CEO said that things will start stabilizing at the start of next year.

I'm just a hobbyist who knows a few EEs though, so might be wrong. But this is my impression.

[1]: https://www.audioholics.com/news/fire-destroys-akm-audio-chi...

[2]: https://www.strata-gee.com/akm-responds-to-strata-gee-reques...

Should we create a FDIC-like mechanism for chips, to reduce companies'incentive to "bank run" their vendors? Have the federal reserve always stockpile 10% of circulating chips registered in the program.

I mean it's literally in TFA:

"In late September Micron, an Idaho-based maker of memory chips, reported a 20% year-on-year fall in quarterly sales. A week later amd, a Californian chip designer, slashed its sales estimate for the third quarter by 16%. Within days Bloomberg reported that Intel plans to lay off thousands of staff, following a string of poor results"

But most of the article is about how they're building new fabs in America, right when sales to China are being restricted. So its about a future surge in supply and reduction in demand.

Parent is talking about distributor stock and you are talking about sales.

If your comment was accurate it would seem like we should have had distributor stock coming online after the pandemic shortages as companies push to get their orders in the queue before capacity goes offline due to conflict.

I’m curious with parent — my guess is just that the humans behind the companies got used to the profits and not sitting on inventory, which was always risky.

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