[BobL]

Wow, thanks. And it does bring up another issue for people to consider. Even IF companies develop workarounds to deal with their supply chains being disrupted, who says that quality won’t suffer? Particularly if they’re making substitutions with replacements that may just be a bit different than their standard parts.

So, at this point, if we see a big drop-off in product quality (of virtually everything)...we shouldn’t be surprised, given all the dislocation being caused by China.

[griffin]

Im in engineering. Have not seen much influnce of this stuff at work yet, but we are ITAR stuff. However, it will work its way to us, if only to make supply of domestic sourced materials tight.

[SteveH]

taiwan might be in a position to help on short notice? alternatively the same might be said for several se asian countries...

[Myrddin]

Supplier changes can hurt you very bad. I had to evaluate a problem with a GPS assembly that was not able to accomplish a first fix after a change of suppliers of the crystal. On analysis, the replacement device was drifting more in 3 weeks than was permitted over 10 years. The supplier left some acid on the quartz slice. The previous supplier had made a product to spec and the GPS oscillator was within spec. No problem getting a first fix. The manufacturer wanted to just flash the firmware on the GPS to compensate for the drift. That would have been fruitless. The labor to swap the GPS module vs reflash was a wash. They swapped in replacement modules with in-spec crystals and remanufactured the modules with the bad crystal with "in spec" devices. A painful consequence of a supplier change, but resolved to the satisfaction of customer and manufacturer.