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Dram and nand manufacturers have been under producing. The logic being that last time there was an undersupply everyone upped production and flooded the market.

Dram and nand manufacturers have been under producing. The logic being that last time there was an undersupply everyone upped production and flooded the market. They see this as a massive negative as it dropped prices and sunk everyone into losses. Dram and nand fabbing does not use the same process as cpus. Thus it has its own seperate supply and those machines can only be used to make that supply. Thus there is no simple mechanism for the market to self regulate. Unless a maker is willing to idle multi million dollar machines supply is fixed. Which is just another way of saying that a significant portion of the cost in dram and nand manufacturing are fixed costs and thus even if you lose money overall because you make money on the marginal unit you are forced to keep making more units even as you lose money. Its a tough industry but for now they have a sweet situation going. Provided no new makers enter the market and no existing makers up supply they will keep printing cash.

digi_owl 9y ago
On top of that SBC makers are competing with smartphones for parts. And while possibly a bad example in this regard, Apple has a history of reserving whole yearly factory outputs to ensure they have the parts available.
- gh02t 9y ago
  Not so much that they are competing for parts with smartphones so much as they are straight up picking up the leftovers. Nobody making SBCs is really shipping enough units to really have any leverage with suppliers, not even the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Any shortages are gonna hit them first.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Kinda. At least with the RPi it is successful enough that their SOC supplier has been making custom chips for them to maintain various compatibilities while boosting performance.
    - frankharv 9y ago
      Well I lived through the Raspberry Pi2C v1.1 and v1.2 debacle. They switched from an 32 bit CPU to a 64bit CPU without changing the board nomenclature. Couldn't they call it Raspberry Pi2-C to help programmers? [0]https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/21/raspberry-pi-2-gets-an-upgrade-to-64-bit-broadcom-bcm2837-processor-with-pcb-version-1-2/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/21/raspberry-pi-2-gets-...
- chx 9y ago
  More, Apple has been fronting billions for factories and then reserving the output for a while. Crazy.
golem14 9y ago
Sounds like opec
- greglindahl 9y ago
  No, it's not like OPEC -- most of their wells don't require new investment to keep going. It IS like fracking.
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I work for a tech company in Taiwan who package DRAM and SD cards. The factory takes silicon wafers, grinds them down to the right thickness, cuts them up (dicing), bonds wires on, puts them into plastic chip packages, tests them, and puts the finished chips into pretty cardboard boxes with plastic windows that you see for sale in stores. The testing and manufacturing machines are really expensive. The parent company invested too much in x-ray machines to test BGA chip packages, and almost went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Management wanted to fire the expensive programmers in the IT department/call centre/automation. My boss (the founder's son) just finished his Masters in Artificial Intelligence in the US. He wasn't going to let the programmers just leave. So he made a startup company in the same office, spun off, refinanced the loans, and now both companies work together closely but the IT department can also do contracts for other clients to help stay afloat. Automation tasks are fun when I get them - lots of coding drivers for old hardware in the testing area. Most of the time the factory just keeps running though, so I can do data analysis on the log files to help optimise the scheduling. Most cards are manufactured at high capacity (e.g. 512GB SD card, 400 GB microSD). When they fail a test, they are "reworked" - the die is cut in half with an electron microscope, and tested again. Thus we get many small cards and a few expensive big cards. The clients are the people with their name on the SD card, and they're the ones designing the silicon. If they order more, the factory has the capacity. But if the purchase orders are down, we can't make more unless they sell. tl;dr - It's a market issue, not a factory issue.
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Photos from back in the core memory days (not from me): http://crooksteven.blogspot.tw/2011/01/taiwans-export-processing-zones.html http://crooksteven.blogspot.tw/2011/01/taiwans-export-proces...
- wiz21c 9y ago
  damn that was a super informative comment ! kudo's!
- wtallis 9y ago
  > When they fail a test, they are "reworked" - the die is cut in half with an electron microscope, and tested again. Are they actually slicing NAND flash dies, or just unstacking them and disabling defective blocks? (The largest NAND dies so far are 512Gb TLC, which is 64GB, so large SD cards need several dies.)

digi_owl 9y ago

On top of that SBC makers are competing with smartphones for parts. And while possibly a bad example in this regard, Apple has a history of reserving whole yearly factory outputs to ensure they have the parts available.

gh02t 9y ago
Not so much that they are competing for parts with smartphones so much as they are straight up picking up the leftovers. Nobody making SBCs is really shipping enough units to really have any leverage with suppliers, not even the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Any shortages are gonna hit them first.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Kinda. At least with the RPi it is successful enough that their SOC supplier has been making custom chips for them to maintain various compatibilities while boosting performance.
  - frankharv 9y ago
    Well I lived through the Raspberry Pi2C v1.1 and v1.2 debacle. They switched from an 32 bit CPU to a 64bit CPU without changing the board nomenclature. Couldn't they call it Raspberry Pi2-C to help programmers? [0]https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/21/raspberry-pi-2-gets-an-upgrade-to-64-bit-broadcom-bcm2837-processor-with-pcb-version-1-2/ https://www.cnx-software.com/2016/11/21/raspberry-pi-2-gets-...
chx 9y ago
More, Apple has been fronting billions for factories and then reserving the output for a while. Crazy.

golem14 9y ago

Sounds like opec

greglindahl 9y ago
No, it's not like OPEC -- most of their wells don't require new investment to keep going. It IS like fracking.

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I work for a tech company in Taiwan who package DRAM and SD cards. The factory takes silicon wafers, grinds them down to the right thickness, cuts them up (dicing), bonds wires on, puts them into plastic chip packages, tests them, and puts the finished chips into pretty cardboard boxes with plastic windows that you see for sale in stores. The testing and manufacturing machines are really expensive. The parent company invested too much in x-ray machines to test BGA chip packages, and almost went bankrupt in the dot-com crash. Management wanted to fire the expensive programmers in the IT department/call centre/automation. My boss (the founder's son) just finished his Masters in Artificial Intelligence in the US. He wasn't going to let the programmers just leave. So he made a startup company in the same office, spun off, refinanced the loans, and now both companies work together closely but the IT department can also do contracts for other clients to help stay afloat. Automation tasks are fun when I get them - lots of coding drivers for old hardware in the testing area. Most of the time the factory just keeps running though, so I can do data analysis on the log files to help optimise the scheduling. Most cards are manufactured at high capacity (e.g. 512GB SD card, 400 GB microSD). When they fail a test, they are "reworked" - the die is cut in half with an electron microscope, and tested again. Thus we get many small cards and a few expensive big cards. The clients are the people with their name on the SD card, and they're the ones designing the silicon. If they order more, the factory has the capacity. But if the purchase orders are down, we can't make more unless they sell. tl;dr - It's a market issue, not a factory issue.

peterburkimsher 9y ago
Photos from back in the core memory days (not from me): http://crooksteven.blogspot.tw/2011/01/taiwans-export-processing-zones.html http://crooksteven.blogspot.tw/2011/01/taiwans-export-proces...
wiz21c 9y ago
damn that was a super informative comment ! kudo's!
wtallis 9y ago
> When they fail a test, they are "reworked" - the die is cut in half with an electron microscope, and tested again. Are they actually slicing NAND flash dies, or just unstacking them and disabling defective blocks? (The largest NAND dies so far are 512Gb TLC, which is 64GB, so large SD cards need several dies.)