Why is there a global shortage of semiconductors?
Despite reports of a global semiconductor shortage, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said, 'If automakers want, we'll supply as many new 16nm chips as we
Ask HN: Why is there a chip shortage? | Hacker News
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29781027
The flow of semiconductor shortages shown by Trading Places , a user of Hacker News, is as follows.
1: During the pandemic, consumer durables consumption increased from 10-11% to 13%. The amount of consumption of these 3 percentage points is about 500 billion dollars (about 58 trillion yen) annually. Many of these durable consumer goods generally come with inexpensive microcontrollers and high-end SoCs. In addition, state-of-the-art automobiles are equipped with dozens of inexpensive microcontrollers.
2: On the other hand, looking at spending on durable consumer goods over the last decade, we can see that they were consistently low before the pandemic began. Prior to 2019, the supply chain had to adapt to this low demand.
3: From the above background, in the supply chain, just-in-time production has so far been 'to carry out production activities by drastically reducing inventory by supplying the necessary items for each process when and in the required amount.' We have adopted the system (JIT system). While this method can improve production efficiency, it has the weakness of not being able to respond to a rapid increase in demand.
4: In addition, electric vehicles (EVs) have been added to the chip application field, which was not large until now.
For example, electric vehicle maker Tesla is developing its own AI chip for self-driving cars.
Tesla develops AI chip for autonomous driving in-house, 10 times the performance of NVIDIA system and mask CEO is boastful --GIGAZINE
5: In addition, there is a demand for chips in the automobile manufacturing field for the very cheap ARM and RISC-V , which are sold at low profits instead of the latest chips.
The reasons why automakers are adopting older technologies rather than state-of-the-art chips are detailed below.
Who is responsible for the automobile industry suffering from a shortage of semiconductors? --GIGAZINE
6: 2019 was in a downturn cycle, with many companies having unused equipment.
7: When the pandemic began, companies predicted further declines in demand and put more equipment out of service. This action puts the company in an 'impossible pit'.
8: The COVID-19 pandemic in Asia caused confusion in the factory. You can read how much the factories in Asia were hit by the following articles.
Order to close high-tech factories of Foxconn and Samsung due to the influence of the new coronavirus --GIGAZINE
by Robert Scoble
IPhone production capacity at Foxconn's Indian factory has decreased by more than 50%, probably due to the infection explosion of the new corona-GIGAZINE
9: The transportation bottleneck further complicated the situation. Especially in the United States, the problem of freight transportation has been pointed out, and it is also reported that Amazon is making its own container to avoid this turmoil.
Amazon is approaching the whole picture of its meticulous strategy that made its own container and avoided the turmoil of maritime distribution --GIGAZINE
You can also read the following articles to find out what the transportation turmoil is like.
'A tsunami of cargo is coming,' says a sea shipping company, what's happening in the Pacific? --GIGAZINE
Who can survive the '100-year economic crisis'? --GIGAZINE
The core of the semiconductor shortage is the 120nm chip used by automobile manufacturers. As mentioned above, car makers do not use the latest chips. The traditional 120nm chip has also been underinvested for many years due to low demand growth and low profit margins. Hacker News argues that game consoles and iPhones also use a large number of traditional chips as well as state-of-the-art chips, and the lack of these chips is causing production problems.
Related Posts:
in Hardware, Posted by darkhorse_log