Kliment

NIH (a US government run institution) holds the main patents on mRNA technology.

projects only, remote only (located in Germany)

I do electronics. Normally I help companies turn their idea into a prototype but at the moment all I seem to be doing is putting out fires related to the current part availability crisis. If you're affected by availability problems and want help finding replacement parts or re-engineering your product for manufacturability, I'm happy to help. Don't bother contacting me if you work in or for the car industry.

For more background on the current crisis, see my analysis here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932382

contact - my username on Freenode irc or my username at 0xfb.com

SEEKING WORK - remote only (located in Germany)

I do electronics. Normally I help companies turn their idea into a prototype but at the moment all I seem to be doing is putting out fires related to the current part availability crisis. If you're affected by availability problems and want help finding replacement parts or re-engineering your product for manufacturability, I'm happy to help. Don't bother contacting me if you work in or for the car industry.

For more background on the current crisis, see my analysis here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26932382

contact - my username on Freenode irc or my username at 0xfb.com

For German users who are blocked from Project Gutenberg, here is the original text (in German) http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Kafka,+Franz/Romane/Der+Proz...

Yes. See my reply to your other comment.

I work in this industry, I talk to vendors, I see this stuff daily. If you want the manufacturing-side background, nikkei's semiconductor news has lots of material on this ( https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/ ) including the fabrication disasters that ruined NXP and Renesas. Go through the last few months to see it unfolding. For the other stuff, I can't give you public evidence, but I've been working with customers adapting their designs, and they've had confirmed orders from manufacturers delayed or cancelled, some citing prioritization of the car industry, others not giving any reason, but then auctioning their remaining stock out, with the final bids going to automakers at 8x the 2019 price. Microchip, a major vendor, introduced a program where they will provide prioritized product a year from now in exchange for non-cancelable non-refundable month-by-month demand visibility into the future ( https://www.microchip.com/content/dam/mchp/documents/announc... ). I don't know what sort of link you need, this is literally what I do every day.

Customized car parts are often a major part of a subvendor's revenue, but they are stuck in a monopsony situation - nobody but audi will buy an audi rear seat height adjustment lever. The market power of large automakers mean that they can very quickly become the primary revenue source of a small vendor, and there's no collective action that various vendors can take against the automaker. The automaker can then get away with conditions like having the vendor pay massive penalties for not delivering a number of parts within a 15 minute time window, changing delivery volumes on short notice, or payment terms where they pay for parts months and sometimes years after they are delivered, and the vendor has to sit on their costs in the meantime. The vendor can't afford to lose the automaker as a customer, but they also can't afford to have enough margin to swallow a back-and-forth variation in demand without adjusting production volumes. In this case, the automakers ended up in a tight spot because they had fucked over all their vendors in this way simultaneously, and so ended up in a situation where their production lines were literally standing still because the vendors could not deliver as they had just finished adjusting to the previous change. This is when the automakers shifted to offering way-above-market money for product, because the alternative was massive losses from stuck production lines.

There is a cost to switching, and a time delay. If you switch faster than the optimal interval, you lose some of the stock that was in-process. Because of this, a large industry changing their mind back and forth rapidly with a particular alignment to that interval can cause disproportional disruption. This is happening here. They changed their mind on short notice, causing one wave of disruption as everyone adapted, then they changed their mind on short notice again in the opposite direction, causing a second, even bigger wave of disruption on top of that. Suppose you were on a plane from London to Dubai, and someone tells you to get to New York as fast as possible. You can't turn the plane around, so you wait until you're in Dubai and take the next plane in the opposite direction to New York. But halfway there you get a phone call saying you need to be in Singapore instead. Again, you have to wait until you land before you can do anything about it, and your entire current trip is wasted. Getting from where you were originally headed (Dubai) to your ultimate destination (Singapore) is a short trip, but by timing the instructions at especially inconvenient moments, you end up having to add enormous cost and resource waste to reach the same target. The car industry is definitely paying for their fuckup at the moment, but everyone else who uses electronics is stuck on that plane with them going the wrong way.

Nobody is scrapping old equipment when they move to a new node. The equipment just gets sold to whoever is one rung down on the pecking order, to keep producing parts at a lower profit margin. Early 2000s processes are still in extensive use.

That's not the case here - the case is that they are big and powerful enough to bully suppliers so that suppliers assume a lot of the risks that any normal-sized company with fewer political connections would have to assume itself.

No, that's wrong. Fab slots are not a limited resource (except at the very high end). They just have a lead time of 12-18 months and it takes a lot of time and a lot of lost production to change what they produce any faster than that.

My dramatic shift - never work on a project that helps the car industry. They're now on the same shitlist as weapons, coal, and surveillance capitalism.

Yes. The CPU and GPU demand has nothing to do with it. The reason is the car industry.

For some reason in early 2020 all the car industry execs were convinced that people would buy dramatically fewer cars in 2020, due to pandemic crashing demand. Because they have a religious aversion to holding any stock they decided to shift the risk over to their suppliers, fucking said suppliers over, as the car industry normally does when they expect demand shifts. The thing that made this particular time special as opposed to business as usual is that the car execs all got it wrong, because people bought way more cars due to pandemic rather than less, due to moving out of cities and avoiding public transit. So they fucked over their suppliers a second time by demanding all those orders back.

Now, suppose you're a supplier of some sort of motor driver or power conversion chip (PMIC) in early 2020. You run 200 wafers per month through a fab running some early 2000s process. Half your yearly revenue is a customized part for a particular auto vendor. That vendor calls you up and tells you that they will not be paying you for any parts this year, and you can figure out what to do with them. You can't afford to run your production at half the revenue, so you're screwed. You call up your fab and ask if you can get out of that contract and pay a penalty for doing so, and you reduce your fab order to 100 wafers per month, so you can at least serve your other customers. The fab is annoyed but they put out an announcement that a slot is free, and another vendor making a PMIC for computer motherboards buys it, because they can use the extra capacity and expect increased demand for computers. So far so normal. One vendor screwed, but they'll manage, one fab slightly annoyed that they had to reduce throughput a tiny bit while they find a new buyer.

Then a few months later the car manufacturer calls you again and asks for their orders back, and more on top. You tell them to fuck off, because you can no longer manufacture it this year. They tell you they will pay literally anything because their production lines can't run without it because (for religious reasons) they have zero inventory buffers. So what do you do? You call up your fab and they say they can't help you, that slot is already gone. So you ask them to change which mask they use for the wafers you already have reserved, and instead of making your usual non-automotive products, you only make the customized chip for the automotive market. And then, because they screwed you over so badly, and you already lost lots of money and had to lay off staff due to the carmaker, you charge them 6x to 8x the price. All your other customers are now screwed, but you still come out barely ahead. Now, of course the customer not only asked for their old orders back, but more. So you call up all the other customers of the fab you use and ask them if they're willing to trade their fab slots for money. Some do, causing a shortage of whatever they make as well. Repeat this same story for literally every chipmaker that makes anything used by a car. This was the situation in January 2021. Then, several major fabs were destroyed (several in Texas, when the big freeze killed the air pumps keeping the cleanrooms sterile, and the water pipes in the walls of the buildings burst and contaminated other facilities, and one in Japan due to a fire) making the already bad problem worse. So there are several mechanisms that make part availability poor here:

1. The part you want is used in cars. Car manufacturers have locked in the following year or so of production, and "any amount extra you can make in that time" for a multiple of the normal price. Either you can't get the parts at all or you'll be paying a massive premium.

2. The part you want is not used in cars, but is made by someone who makes other parts on the same process that are used in cars. Your part has been deprioritized and will not be manufactured for months. Meanwhile stock runs out and those who hold any stock massively raise prices.

3. The part you want is not used in cars, and the manufacturer doesn't supply the car industry, but uses a process used by someone who does. Car IC suppliers have bought out their fab slots, so the part will not be manufactured for months.

4. The part you want is not used in cars, and doesn't share a process with parts that are. However, it's on the BOM of a popular product that uses such parts, and the manufacturer has seen what the market looks like and is stocking up for months ahead. Distributor inventory is therefore zero and new stock gets snapped up as soon as it shows up because a single missing part means you can't produce your product.

So here we are. Shameless plug - email me if you are screwed by this and need help getting your product re-engineered to the new reality. There's a handful of manufacturers, usually obscure companies in mainland China that only really sell to the internal market, that are much less affected. Some have drop-in replacement parts for things that are out of stock, others have functionally similar parts that can be used with minor design adaptation. I've been doing that kind of redesign work for customers this whole year. Don't email me if you work in/for the car industry. You guys poisoned the well for all of us so deal with it yourselves.

Sure you can, you just need to low-temp bake them before reflow to get the moisture back out.

Hey, if you need help finding replacements I might be able to help - I've literally been doing mostly this for customers since January. It's absolute bullshit and I've never seen this before in all my time in this industry.

email in my profile.

They actually did disrupt the entire market like that. They cancelled all their orders, causing fab capacity to be redirected to other markets, then they came back and asked for their orders back, at any price, and everyone who was already making something else switched their now fewer available slots to service the car industry. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842924

I explained it in a comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842924 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659709

Car companies are literally paying 6x to 8x 2019 prices right now and still can't get stock.

It's more than that. I explained this last time someone asked, here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842924

They hang out at the same parties. For some reason all the car industry execs were convinced that people would buy dramatically fewer cars in 2020. Because they have a religious aversion to holding any stock they decided to shift the risk over to their suppliers, fucking said suppliers over, as the car industry normally does when they expect demand shifts. The thing that made this particular time special as opposed to business as usual is that the car execs all got it wrong, because people bought way more cars due to pandemic rather than less, due to moving out of cities and avoiding public transit. So they fucked over their suppliers a second time by demanding all those orders back.

Now, suppose you're a supplier of some sort of motor driver or power conversion chip (PMIC) in early 2020. You run 200 wafers per month through a fab running some early 2000s process. Half your yearly revenue is a customized part for a particular auto vendor. That vendor calls you up and tells you that they will not be paying you for any parts this year, and you can figure out what to do with them. You can't afford to run your production at half the revenue, so you're screwed. You call up your fab and ask if you can get out of that contract and pay a penalty for doing so, and you reduce your fab order to 100 wafers per month, so you can at least serve your other customers. The fab is annoyed but they put out an announcement that a slot is free, and another vendor making a PMIC for computer motherboards buys it, because they can use the extra capacity and expect increased demand for computers. So far so normal. One vendor screwed, but they'll manage, one fab slightly annoyed that they had to reduce throughput a tiny bit while they find a new buyer.

Then a few months later the car manufacturer calls you again and asks for their orders back, and more on top. You tell them to fuck off, because you can no longer manufacture it this year. They tell you they will pay literally anything because their production lines can't run without it because (for religious reasons) they have zero inventory buffers. So what do you do? You call up your fab and they say they can't help you, that slot is already gone. So you ask them to change which mask they use for the wafers you already have reserved, and instead of making your usual non-automotive products, you only make the customized chip for the automotive market. And then, because they screwed you over so badly, and you already lost lots of money and had to lay off staff due to the carmaker, you charge them 6x to 8x the price. All your other customers are now screwed, but you still come out barely ahead. Now, of course the customer not only asked for their old orders back, but more. So you call up all the other customers of the fab you use and ask them if they're willing to trade their fab slots for money. Some do, causing a shortage of whatever they make as well. Repeat this same story for literally every chipmaker that makes anything used by a car. This was the situation in January 2021. Then, several major fabs were destroyed (several in Texas, when the big freeze killed the air pumps keeping the cleanrooms sterile, and the water pipes in the walls of the buildings burst and contaminated other facilities, and one in Japan due to a fire) making the already bad problem worse. So there are several mechanisms that make part availability poor here:

1. The part you want is used in cars. Car manufacturers have locked in the following year or so of production, and "any amount extra you can make in that time" for a multiple of the normal price. Either you can't get the parts at all or you'll be paying a massive premium.

2. The part you want is not used in cars, but is made by someone who makes other parts on the same process that are used in cars. Your part has been deprioritized and will not be manufactured for months. Meanwhile stock runs out and those who hold any stock massively raise prices.

3. The part you want is not used in cars, and the manufacturer doesn't supply the car industry, but uses a process used by someone who does. Car IC suppliers have bought out their fab slots, so the part will not be manufactured for months.

4. The part you want is not used in cars, and doesn't share a process with parts that are. However, it's on the BOM of a popular product that uses such parts, and the manufacturer has seen what the market looks like and is stocking up for months ahead. Distributor inventory is therefore zero and new stock gets snapped up as soon as it shows up because a single missing part means you can't produce your product.

and this is how a conference call among car industry exec buddies that have convinced each other that for some reason people will buy fewer cars in a pandemic managed to destroy the entire electronics market for (hopefully no more than) a year or so

a "tape out" is the process of transforming a design into a physical die - i.e. a manufacturing run. It's when you hand over a design to a foundry to do their thing with it.

This is an extremely low volume prototype run. You can get those scheduled on short notice. Fabs love them because they can do process optimization using them, without impacting production customers. They're ridiculously expensive per-die and you commit to accept a much higher failure rate than normal.

ST can and is making microcontrollers. It's just that they've sold their production for a year ahead, before it's even been manufactured. Car companies fucked everyone over by flipping a large volume of orders back and forth causing bullwhip effect on the whole industry, and lots of knock-on effects in other industries who suddenly got told (occasionally too late) that they need to plan their inventory a year ahead because they can't get anything at short notice anymore. Car companies vehicle production volume is tens of millions, but each vehicle has thousands to tens of thousands of ICs. The six months you are mentioning are not the capacity period, they are the lead times involved.

I don't want to repeat the whole story but I wrote a comment about this on another thread. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659709

Oh wow what happened? Their 2019 numbers were terrible.

Not the person you're asking but here's my take anyway:

I use wx for my own stuff and also use a lot of wx-based applications. Wx is quirky and has some bugs but it's not going to go away or have a massive breaking change without warning. Its biggest weakness is the slow release schedule which leaves users waiting for a long time to access things that are critical on changing platforms (macos is a massive pain to support as the underlying system changes all the damn time). My opinion of it can be summarized as "the worst, except for all the others" so I keep using it.

I keep considering Qt whenever I start a new project and I'm still scared to use it. It's controlled by a company that is in really bad shape financially and has a history of attempting stupid things for short-term profit and screwing over customers. It's reasonable if you can manage with either just the LGPL components or if your entire project is GPL, but if not their license terms are really terrible and get worse and worse over time. They keep making changes that fuck over their paying customers. I don't feel good about using this at the moment. The KDE people have thankfully got that company by the balls with a watertight contract, and I totally trust the KDE people, but there's still plenty of damage the company can do, and every sign they will. It's really unfortunate because Qt is otherwise an excellent platform.

Multiplatform gtk is a pain. There are a few projects that successfully pull it off (Horizon EDA is a notable example) but I don't think I could manage it myself.

If you're doing a new thing you might want to consider one of the many imgui implementations (as you seem to be thinking in that direction already).

You understand semi-correctly. Here's my analysis on this from another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659709

The suppliers didn't mothball the facilities (which are not at all antiquated, and are massively in use for other things), they just sold that capacity to less capricious customers.

Yep, and those are a recent development and much less likely to last than 4-legged chairs. So are, for that matter, offices.

Sure, if you add extra remapping hardware, nonvolatile storage, and eat the performance penalties. Makes sense for massive quantities of crappy cheap flash, not so much for this.

Don't work with/for companies that use patents. Don't consent to companies using your work to file patents. If they do anyway, publish prior art where possible.

Write down and publish as many things as possible to enable prior art searches. If an important case affects a field you've been working on for decades, actively help victims find prior art.

Consistently vote against IP maximalists wherever you have an opportunity. Don't have relationships with IP maximalists.

Remind the general public about how bad and stupid patents are when you have the opportunity.

Don't buy products that advertise using "patented technology" or "patent pending". If you have no choice, buy used.

If you are in control of a company's patent strategy, file lots of provisional patents then abandon them, so they show up in the database when patent examiners search for prior art.

Financially support victims of patent attacks and help them get as many patents invalidated as possible.

Have you seen the die images of the ESP32? Basically the entire die area is SRAM. SRAM eats a ton of space, and with a bigger die area you have a much higher likelihood per part that you will have a defect and have to scrap the entire chip.

The car industry has fucked everyone over and noone is immune, regardless how big. If you're interested in how this happened, I wrote my understanding of it on another, related thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659709