Posted on 06/07/2021 1:50:55 PM PDT by blam
I posted an article here to FR a while back stating that the farm harvester makers had stopped shipments all-together.
Here, found it:
This is idiocracy. Leave me alone I’m bating.
There’s definitely a shortage of chips NOT Made In China....
Works great until it doesn’t. And then things go south very fast!
I don’t consider it idiotic, but it is very clear that people didn’t give serious enough consideration to the downside.
I wonder if this will have companies reconsidering the risk/reward of just-in-time manufacturing now that they are seeing a very scary, and prolonged downside.
How pervasive will the ripple effect be through the economy? I’m afraid we are going to find out.
nope not a silicon shortage just the CCP deciding that they needed their chips for more of their own cheap phones, their own vehicles and their own electronics, to sell to 40 odd ‘asian’ nations and they’ll get around to foreign orders when they get around to it. Qualcomm and Apple are players in that game.
Add in the US only producing 12% of the world semiconductor supply, and a mid-March fire in the Japan-based Renesas factory that produces 1/3 of vehicle microcontroller chips worldwide, and there you are.
Why? Why is no one forcing these talking heads to be specific? It’s like saying high lumber prices are due to a lack of trees, which is BS, there are as many trees as a year ago. Same for semis.
I think some of the wafer fabs must have shut down for a spell due to COVID-19, not putting out any chips at all.(?)
Something like “putting all your eggs in one basket” comes to mind.
Chip factories would be infrastructure...
No doubt, but typical wafer runs are 6-8 weeks, so it should be a temporary glitch. There were two fab fires, but the latest at a Reneasas fab in Naka - company says they’re rapidly outsourcing and getting replacement equipment in ahead of schedule. They make 20% of the microcontrollers and were shut down for 3 months by the earthqake in 2011 but that didn’t cause this kind of disruption. The impact just seems to be out of proportion.
So my old electronics, with their chips, will be worth millions?
What’s the bigger story, here? 🤔
Intel, SK Hynix, and Global Foundries are all breaking ground on new fabs this year. The problem is that it takes several years to build a modern clean room and stock it with the proper equipment and qualify the processes. All fabs are operating at high utilization now because the equipment and material is so expensive that this is required to be competative. There is not spare capacity that can just be turned on when more demand rises.
I have an old gasoline engine on a boat, and every season change the points, plugs, rotor (hey, it’s a boat), and check the ports on the carburetor.
A younger boater asked what I had been doing, and I mentioned the carburetor. The blank look told me everything. He was a sharp kid, but had never seen anything that wasn’t electronically timed and fuel injected.
Then we started talking about diesel boat engines, and things got less weird.
Totally believable. Meanwhile, I’ve still got a timing light buried away in the toolbox. That’d be a What’s that? moment with that guy.
You have skills I can only dream of.
All chips. All semiconductor electronic chips.
We are so screwed.
Hey look on the bright side. When the Chicoms detonate a nuke over our country and fry every piece of electronics we will be back in the 1800’s with horses. Horses don’t require chips to drive. Invest in hay bales.
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