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I'm having a tough time buying STM32 MCUs. When I started my most recent designs about 6 months ago, the SMT-assembly service I used, and retailers like Digikey
by the__alchemist 6y ago
I'm having a tough time buying STM32 MCUs. When I started my most recent designs about 6 months ago, the SMT-assembly service I used, and retailers like Digikey and Mouser had ample stock. Now, I'm unable to start production due to being unable to find MCUs. The whole STM32 line is affected - Only a handful of variants are available, which may or may not be the ones a given design can use.
- chadaustin 6y agoWhat assembly service do you use?
- the__alchemist 6y agoJLCPCB. I'm curious if there are others that have stock; may have to switch if JLC and the retailers are all out. I posted on the ST forums; the replies speculated it would be months for this to sort out.
- bsder 6y agoSurprising. ST runs their own fabs. People must be stockpiling, and ST is replenishing the most profitable stuff first.
- mastax 6y agoI started a new project last week and I chose my STM32 by sorting by stock High -> Low. A year ago it wasn't even a consideration (I make low volume stuff). I sent a big complicated board to manufacturing a month ago. I was making changes up to the last minute based on availability. One of the parts went out of stock and I provided an alternate part number. A week ago my assembler contacted me and said that went out of stock as well. I'm a bit pissed off that they didn't order it when they confirmed the change and there was plenty of stock, but I'll cut them some slack because they're in Houston. Now there's no stock of the part anywhere in the world except a single Aliexpress store. I can't overstate how strange it is to see such widespread availability problems. Pretty soon I'll have to design things with nothing but discrete transistors.