How and when the chip shortage will end
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
The rest of us waiting for high end processes to expand in availability and drop in price? ASML basically has an infinite waitlist at this point.
Sounds simple, costs millions.
There isn’t actually a chip shortage methinks - more like a shortage of intelligence and common sense.
it's tough to program your way out of needing a regulator or amplifier or something.
It is the older lines, making voltage regulators and power management chips, making it difficult to put the whole solution together.
While some of these chips could be redesigned to use new processes, or older designs with larger format fabs brought up to accommodate demand, both of these situations are short-term and thus no one wants to invest.
Then, for any entity that successfully moves from one supplier with one process size to a different one...they are creating more demand there, which could precipitate shortages now in that space. Then, there's peripheral effects. Like perhaps some of the suppliers are liking the new per-unit margins during the shortage, and won't just let it all go when demand/supply normalizes.
We are just coming off the highs of using GPUs to generate mountains of useless money that was used to effect massive scams. But even all that is still going on.
And free market capitalism is supposed to result in efficient resource allocation? What are we even doing, trying to accelerate the heat death of the universe? Entropy not increasing fast enough for us?
Like… maybe we wouldn’t need so much silicon if we were using it a little better. Might as well just store everything in linked lists. Who even cares about data structures anymore?
Used to be that you could program a computer with everything in your head. Then you had to use the Internet, a global network of information, as a resource because it got so complicated. Now it's so bad that you also need an artificial intelligence that can interpret the information on the Internet. All so we can, what... serve more ads? Invade more privacy? Wage more wars? Earn more profits? What are we even doing with this technology?
Even that is incorrect, or, to be precise, correct that it is indeed Python - however it is that part of Python which is actually written in C/C++ and highly optimized.
There is a reason why Python is used for data science, ML and similar. It is both convenient to use and fast, thanks to numpy and other libraries.
I realize that the point of your post is something else entirely, but no need to pick on Python. It's actually quite performant in areas where this is needed.
But no, here we are with the worst of all worlds. Maybe that day will come, but the long-term, industry-wide trend is more silicon needed to accomplish roughly the same end goal. We're playing the same games, writing the same excel docs, browsing the same webpages, but now it takes more energy, more silicon, more transistors... call me skeptical we're going to add all this LLM tech on top of the already towering tech stack, and it will result in a reduction of needed silicon because we've simplified the whole thing considerably.
> It is both convenient to use and fast, thanks to numpy and other libraries. I realize that the point of your post is something else entirely, but no need to pick on Python.
My point though, was that the fast and convenient is only interesting when it comes together as a package. Other languages are faster, even granting that some Python packages are written in native code. But if the new interface to Python is an LLM, then "Python" as a language doesn't have a place anymore; it'll be more convenient to emit code in other languages.
> This post was corrected on 30 June to clarify historic 200-mm fab equipment spending.
> This article appears in the August 2021 print issue as “How and When the Chip Shortage Will End.”
Only the top few paragraphs are an update, the remainder of the content is "29 June 2021".
Even if you can find a substitute, it can take engineering effort to accommodate it, such as board changes and testing. Oh, and the people who can do this, have all moved to software engineering jobs that pay more, or they retired during the pandemic.
My tiny side business just went through this. The chip that I need became unavailable, as did all reasonable substitutes, at any price. I had to re-design my board in order to accommodate a different chip. Fortunately my labor is cheap and available, but dumping a whole bunch of that kind of work on a commercial business, all at once, can be painful.
There is a chip shortage.
Solution: buy another, obsolete PHY chip for only 2x price and strip ADCs for older products.
Just look at Mouser and Digikey, too many parts aren’t in stock and lead times with 1,5 years are ridiculous.
Largely, I've read, those fabs were turned off -- they were in a legacy / sustaining engineering mode before covid. Lots of things, when you turn them off, for any reason, they're very difficult to turn back on; I suspect fabs are like this.
So -- the age of $0.50 parts made in a fab that was state of the art in 1997 is over. We must make new parts, on new processes, that are substantially different from those original parts, or we must make a 1997 fab. If you can't source all the 1997 machine tools to make the 1997 fab, that fab is likely a $200 billion dollars to build the first one and many tens of billions for each added 1997 fab. So those $0.50 parts are likely going to be $80 parts for the first 8 years of that "1997" fab's lifecycle.
Likely not going to happen.
You can't make that $0.15 chip on a new fab partially because the chips made on a super tiny process are different in a whole bunch of different ways (operating voltages, temperature / environmental tolerances, etc).
Maybe you can scrape together enough legacy parts from expired fabs to make some number of legacy "new" fabs, but even that's super tricky because just making the fab facility itself is hugely expensive and you can't fund it by selling the high margin parts that funded the 1997 fab from 1997 to 2004.
The designs need to change to allow using the higher density nodes (redesign entire ecosystems of parts / products) or you need to accept that the $0.15 part is now a $20 part for the next 6 years or longer.
... the most problematic shortages will begin to ease in the third or
fourth quarter of 2021, though it could take much of 2022 for the
resulting chips to work their way through the supply chain to products.
The supply relief will not be coming from the big, national investments
in the works right now by South Korea, the United States, and Europe but
from older chip fabs and foundries running processes far from the cutting
edge and on comparatively small silicon wafers.
... Despite the auto industry’s desperation, there’s no great rush to
build new 200-mm fabs. ... More than 40 companies will increase capacity
by more than 750,000 wafers-per-month from the beginning of 2020 to the
end of 2022. The long-term trend to the end of 2024 is for a 17 percent
increase in capacity for 200-mm facilities. Spending on equipment for
these fabs is set to rise to $4.6 billion in 2021 after crossing the
$3-billion mark in 2020 for the first time in years, SEMI says. But
then spending will drop back to $4 billion in 2022. In comparison,
spending to equip 300-mm fabs is expected to hit $78-billion in 2021.
Saying “Tesla redesigned away from the chip shortage” is massively dismissing the challenges that they faced vs the other companies.
I know this sounds obvious but I hadn't thought of it before
I've had that dumb/good? idea stuck in my brain since reading George Gilder back in 1981.
Until they just worked thanks to backprop and deep nets
Well imagine that
A few years ago we had problems with potato chips (the flat kind): https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39574512
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/high-egg-prices-due-to-a-col...
> However, food economists are skeptical an inquiry would uncover wrongdoing.
> “I don’t think we’ve seen anything that makes us think that there’s something there other than normal economics happening right now,” said Amy Smith, vice president at Advanced Economic Solutions.
When profits are suddenly up 700% this claim no longer holds water.
> High egg prices send profits at largest US producer soaring more than 700%
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/29/business/egg-profits-cal-main...
In the short term, I expect profit margins to increase for goods experiencing supply / demand shocks due to market participants trying to figure out which way supply and demand curves are moving, and in shortage scenarios, buyers willing to pay more than necessary to secure the goods.
Note that the buyers have options to consume other foods for their nutritional needs.
The high prices work to incentivize competitors to enter the market and increase the supply. If only the government would stop letting competitors merge together...
No, the alternative to price gouging is to maintain a normal profit margin since your flocks didn't have to be culled and your costs have not gone up.
If anything, the flocks that had to be culled would have caused a sudden chicken feed surplus and their feed cost should have fallen.
If there are fewer eggs, then there are fewer eggs. The only thing left to discuss is who has the right to obtain them, and who will not. Usually, society accepts that people with more money get more access to things than people with less money.
Colluding to price gouge consumers when costs have not increased is illegal behavior.
Hope to see more Oil like use of semiconductor technology for strategic geopolitical purposes. So the supply problem is not going to end, but rather fluctuate, just like oil.
China is pushing to break that link. With Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and Venezuela on its side it may very well succeed in that.
> what’s the currency for the semiconductors
I see a multi-currency world. For semiconductor it won't be currency but access to raw material, supply chain and technology. Two examples of this are the blockage of supply of rare earths metal to Japan by China a few years ago during a diplomatic crisis, and very recently refusal by ASML, due to pressure from the US, to supply semiconductor equipments to China.