12 ms·

Chip-starved automakers shudder at Renesas plant's 1-month halt

89 points by fomine3 6y ago

baybal2 6y ago
https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%253A%252F%252Fs3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com%252Fpsh-ex-ftnikkei-3937bb4%252Fimages%252F_aliases%252Farticleimage%252F7%252F8%252F0%252F1%252F33131087-3-eng-GB%252FCropped-1616317611PR20210321-0031-01.jpg?source=nar-cms https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt... This is certainly not a "one month outage"
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- latch 6y ago
  Did you read the article? There are 2 cleanrooms. The 2nd story one is undamaged but needs the 1st story one to be repaired (I assume it's a structural thing?). So I'm curious how, from 1 picture, your comment can be informed? Also from the article, the fire damaged 5% of the first cleanroom and 11 machines. Maybe they're able to get the other 95% back up and running without having the damaged 600sqft fully functional?
  - BenoitP 6y ago
    > I assume it's a structural thing? Maybe repairing the first floor will generate too much vibrations and additional dust on the external environment.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > Did you read the article? I did > There are 2 cleanrooms. The 2nd story one is undamaged but needs the 1st story one to be repaired (I assume it's a structural thing?). I don't believe they have multiple clean floors. Fabs are usually done with space below the clean floor being where machinery for supply of liquids/gasses is, and space above being used for air handling equipment. Some have a storage floor, but that's usually it, especially for a smaller fab.
    - newswasboring 6y ago
      Sub fabs are not always about liquids/gases etc. Some fabs, especially bigger DUV fabs, use the sub fab to run their lasers so that scanners can be arranged on the track in a sane way. edit: btw, almost all fabs I have seen have multiple clean floors. Even the sub fabs doing only plumbing work would maintain a clean environment. I'm guessing because thats cheaper than maintaining the interface which goes from clean to unclean environments.
      - baybal2 6y ago
        Do you mean multiple tool floors/litho line floors?
        newswasboring 6y ago
        TSMC even has litho lines in separate buildings. Its not that uncommon.
qwerty456127 6y ago
Automakers should make cars with less chips. Touchscreen controls, licenses to accept, firmwares to update, tracking to spy on you and Internet-attached locks to crack are abominable. I want a car as analog as possible without loosing much of the engine efficiency.
- yarcob 6y ago
  I think even all the "analog" stuff in modern cars uses chips. A modern engine wouldn't work without chips. LEDs won't work without chips. Automatic AC won't work without chips. ABS, ESP, etc. are all based on microcontrollers as well. Not even the speedometer needle is actually analog anymore, it's all digital now.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > ESP, etc. I tried to parse this for way too long. The ESP32 and ESP8266 are chips themselves. I need to raise my head out the weeds.
  - paganel 6y ago
    > Not even the speedometer needle is actually analog anymore, it's all digital now. And that's a petty.
    - MertsA 6y ago
      On the contrary, my first car still had an analog speedometer. It really sucked when it failed because the failure mode was that it turned decidedly non-linear past about 50 mph indicated. The first time I drove it after the failure I hadn't driven it in probably a couple months and I was driving it at night without any traffic around. I wound up getting pulled over on the highway and the indicated speed was off by 15 mph. At least with a digital speedometer almost every failure mode is going to be obvious and not some subtle accuracy degradation. Part of the supposed rationale for police almost always not enforcing the speed limit until a good margin over is because of the historic inaccuracies of speedometers. Nowadays assuming someone hasn't modified some gear ratio or fitted the wrong size tires you can more or less be assured that the speedometer will be quite accurate.
TedShiller 6y ago
Interesting story from Africa: My friend is a professional photographer who does several thousand-mile long road trips through the remote African wilderness. Wherever he goes, he gets cash offers on his tricked out SUV dating from 1998. The reason is that this was the last year before the SUV became loaded with all kinds of computer chips. If the pre-1998 SUV model breaks down in the middle of the Sahara, all you need is a screwdriver and a wrench to fix it. If you have a recent model however, good luck to you. You're going to have to wait for someone to FedEx a new controller board to you in the middle of nowhere. Most likely you'll have to abandon your SUV entirely. If it really matters, you can't rely on a car that requires a computer to start or to drive. You want something purely mechanical.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  That was the case in Russia villages. Old Russian cars were used everywhere and one could fix anything with a wrench and hammer. Those people were reluctant to adopt new cars. I think that it's changed now, as local mechanics got more experience with electronics and stuff. Most of electronics issues actually could be fixed, you can replace capacitors, etc. But of course not in the middle of nowhere. That said, old Toyota cars are still treasury, because they just don't fail. But they're quite costly.
  - timthorn 6y ago
    > That said, old Toyota cars are still treasury, because they just don't fail. An assertion famously tested on Top Gear: https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Toyota_Hilux https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Toyota_Hilux
    - thrwoi4u23434 6y ago
      ... and also not entirely true, as evidenced by the numerous Tacomas cracking in two in the US.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    People in deep rural China few decades ago used to have diesel motorcycles because diesel, or some semblance of it was the only fuel available to other agricultural machinery. Now these times are long past, and few Chinese today even remember that.
throwaway4good 6y ago
I am strugling to understand the nature of the global chip shortage. Is there a single driver? Or is it just a confluence of events: The US-China tech war (preventing expansion of Chinese factories, causing stock-piling from companies fearful of sanctions), factory shutdowns due to the pandemic, unforseen demand in certain areas (work from home equipment, TVs, GPUs for cryptomining), random accidents like this one.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  All an effect of a lack of a futures market in IC fabrication capacity. That means nobody has a global view of future demand (since today most contracts are secret) and cannot invest in capacity accordingly.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    One could fear there to be massive overcapacity in a short time (1-2 years). As mainland Chinese alternative capacity comes online and when some of the weirder demand peters out (GPUs for mining). My intuition is also that there is less pressure in the "let's buy the latest phone game" than there used to be. (For example I am using a 3 year old iPhone X and have no inkling to buy a new one).
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      No need to fear it - the futures market will find people willing to shoulder that risk for a price.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    And a futures market would require capacity to be a complete commodity. Which I don't think it is.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Stocks are not a single commodity, but stocks in thousands of companies over many exchanges, and there exist indexes and ETFs to try to aggregate them. The same can be done with slightly different silicon fabrication facilities. For example, a company who needs their chips manufacturered at Facility A or B, but cannot use facility C would buy a futures contract letting them do that.
throwaway4good 6y ago
HN is funny sometimes. You guys seem to either want a battered down Toyota that you can fix with a screw driver or the absolute latest AI-powered Tesla 666.
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  What's your point? The two cars cover drastically different use cases.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    How are they different use cases? Transportation and showing off? City life and the apocalypse?
    - crubier 6y ago
      Yes
    - protomyth 6y ago
      Well, I'm pretty sure a Tesla isn't going to be a good winter car in North Dakota, but I guess that's the same use case as the apocalypse.
- downrightmike 6y ago
  Ah yes, because HN is just one guy
  - teekert 6y ago
    Well, he described me. I also doubted between an iPhone 12 mini and a PinePhone (the FairPhone was also in the mix). Both (or all 3) appealing for very different reasons.
    - ianai 6y ago
      Would anyone grief a car mechanic for owning a miata, a truck, and probably half a dozen vehicles in total? One form of being a professional involves being an enthusiast.
turbinerneiter 6y ago
I work in a tiny R&D company, mostly building prototypes, and currently, _every single project_ we have that involves hardware is in some sort affected by the general semi-shortage + Mouser (being a Texan company) delivery delays. We weren't able to buy the _150_ micro-controllers we needed for a tiny series production, I'm currently waiting for a literal handful of crimp terminals to be shipped, the 220Vto12V AC/DC converter I normally use is unobtainium. No PS5. No graphics cards. No Vaccines. 6 month wait for bicycles. The biggest LSD producer in Europe got caught, so no LSD either. It's like in communism, but you still have to pay rent.
- toxik 6y ago
  If you only knew how offensive this sounds to people who did live and starve under communism.
  - wlll 6y ago
    Perhaps you could ask them and report back?
  - turbinerneiter 6y ago
    Sorry you took offense. It's a joke. One that criticizes communism btw.
    - toxik 6y ago
      It's pretty obviously not a joke, but a trivialization by comparison.
      - turbinerneiter 6y ago
        You have full authority over the meaning of my words.
        toxik 6y ago
        I never claimed to have authority, but neither do you. A message is as it is received, not as it is intended.
downrightmike 6y ago
Thesis: automakers were already making more cars far above and beyond demand before 2020, they used the pandemic to cut their part orders and now have repercussions from that, but in reality, that is what they want. They need a lack of supply and for current stock to be used up before they will be profitable.
- xadhominemx 6y ago
  Absolutely not. Automotive factories are only profitable when run at high utilization. If ICs are short, then factories cannot run at high utilization.
buescher 6y ago
What's with Japanese chip fabs catching fire? It's very odd that Renesas was producing some chips for AKM at that plant after the AKM plant caught fire. From earlier this year: "Renesas steps up and lends capacity to AKM after the fire" https://evertiq.com/design/49481 https://evertiq.com/design/49481
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Semiconductor fabrication involves pyrophoric vapors. It's pretty dangerous.
  - buescher 6y ago
    That's a good answer for "why would a fab catch fire?", not as good an answer for "why would two fabs in Japan that were producing some of the same chips catch fire?". But as they say, twice is coincidence.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      Right, I'm not taking at face value the claim that Japan is somehow more prone to these fires.
      - buescher 6y ago
        Where did you see that claim?
- fomine3 6y ago
  > The fire was caused by plating equipment in one of the buildings due to a surge in current, https://www.eetimes.com/fire-destroys-part-of-renesas-fab/ https://www.eetimes.com/fire-destroys-part-of-renesas-fab/
froh 6y ago
I wonder when in-vehicle computers come in standard sizes and with standard ports. like 4x gb eth, 8x can, 3x hdmi, 2x usb something along such lines. just like you buy another system from another vendor for your data centre, if your usual supplier happens to have production issues. this would also simplify computer power performance updates, to dunno go from level 2 to level 3 autonomy (assuming sensors are there already). the vehicle part of the vehicle easily lasts 10-15 years. such standardized vehicle computer infrastructure would not only make automotive vendors more independent from board and soc fluctuations, it would keep the car fresh for a longer period of time, and allow for performance software after-market sales. why not? what am I missing?

89 points by fomine3 6y ago

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%253A%252F%252Fs3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com%252Fpsh-ex-ftnikkei-3937bb4%252Fimages%252F_aliases%252Farticleimage%252F7%252F8%252F0%252F1%252F33131087-3-eng-GB%252FCropped-1616317611PR20210321-0031-01.jpg?source=nar-cms https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt... This is certainly not a "one month outage"

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
latch 6y ago
Did you read the article? There are 2 cleanrooms. The 2nd story one is undamaged but needs the 1st story one to be repaired (I assume it's a structural thing?). So I'm curious how, from 1 picture, your comment can be informed? Also from the article, the fire damaged 5% of the first cleanroom and 11 machines. Maybe they're able to get the other 95% back up and running without having the damaged 600sqft fully functional?
- BenoitP 6y ago
  > I assume it's a structural thing? Maybe repairing the first floor will generate too much vibrations and additional dust on the external environment.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > Did you read the article? I did > There are 2 cleanrooms. The 2nd story one is undamaged but needs the 1st story one to be repaired (I assume it's a structural thing?). I don't believe they have multiple clean floors. Fabs are usually done with space below the clean floor being where machinery for supply of liquids/gasses is, and space above being used for air handling equipment. Some have a storage floor, but that's usually it, especially for a smaller fab.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    Sub fabs are not always about liquids/gases etc. Some fabs, especially bigger DUV fabs, use the sub fab to run their lasers so that scanners can be arranged on the track in a sane way. edit: btw, almost all fabs I have seen have multiple clean floors. Even the sub fabs doing only plumbing work would maintain a clean environment. I'm guessing because thats cheaper than maintaining the interface which goes from clean to unclean environments.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      Do you mean multiple tool floors/litho line floors?
      - newswasboring 6y ago
        TSMC even has litho lines in separate buildings. Its not that uncommon.

qwerty456127 6y ago

Automakers should make cars with less chips. Touchscreen controls, licenses to accept, firmwares to update, tracking to spy on you and Internet-attached locks to crack are abominable. I want a car as analog as possible without loosing much of the engine efficiency.

yarcob 6y ago
I think even all the "analog" stuff in modern cars uses chips. A modern engine wouldn't work without chips. LEDs won't work without chips. Automatic AC won't work without chips. ABS, ESP, etc. are all based on microcontrollers as well. Not even the speedometer needle is actually analog anymore, it's all digital now.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > ESP, etc. I tried to parse this for way too long. The ESP32 and ESP8266 are chips themselves. I need to raise my head out the weeds.
- paganel 6y ago
  > Not even the speedometer needle is actually analog anymore, it's all digital now. And that's a petty.
  - MertsA 6y ago
    On the contrary, my first car still had an analog speedometer. It really sucked when it failed because the failure mode was that it turned decidedly non-linear past about 50 mph indicated. The first time I drove it after the failure I hadn't driven it in probably a couple months and I was driving it at night without any traffic around. I wound up getting pulled over on the highway and the indicated speed was off by 15 mph. At least with a digital speedometer almost every failure mode is going to be obvious and not some subtle accuracy degradation. Part of the supposed rationale for police almost always not enforcing the speed limit until a good margin over is because of the historic inaccuracies of speedometers. Nowadays assuming someone hasn't modified some gear ratio or fitted the wrong size tires you can more or less be assured that the speedometer will be quite accurate.

TedShiller 6y ago

Interesting story from Africa: My friend is a professional photographer who does several thousand-mile long road trips through the remote African wilderness. Wherever he goes, he gets cash offers on his tricked out SUV dating from 1998. The reason is that this was the last year before the SUV became loaded with all kinds of computer chips. If the pre-1998 SUV model breaks down in the middle of the Sahara, all you need is a screwdriver and a wrench to fix it. If you have a recent model however, good luck to you. You're going to have to wait for someone to FedEx a new controller board to you in the middle of nowhere. Most likely you'll have to abandon your SUV entirely. If it really matters, you can't rely on a car that requires a computer to start or to drive. You want something purely mechanical.

vbezhenar 6y ago
That was the case in Russia villages. Old Russian cars were used everywhere and one could fix anything with a wrench and hammer. Those people were reluctant to adopt new cars. I think that it's changed now, as local mechanics got more experience with electronics and stuff. Most of electronics issues actually could be fixed, you can replace capacitors, etc. But of course not in the middle of nowhere. That said, old Toyota cars are still treasury, because they just don't fail. But they're quite costly.
- timthorn 6y ago
  > That said, old Toyota cars are still treasury, because they just don't fail. An assertion famously tested on Top Gear: https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Toyota_Hilux https://topgear.fandom.com/wiki/Toyota_Hilux
  - thrwoi4u23434 6y ago
    ... and also not entirely true, as evidenced by the numerous Tacomas cracking in two in the US.
- baybal2 6y ago
  People in deep rural China few decades ago used to have diesel motorcycles because diesel, or some semblance of it was the only fuel available to other agricultural machinery. Now these times are long past, and few Chinese today even remember that.

throwaway4good 6y ago

I am strugling to understand the nature of the global chip shortage. Is there a single driver? Or is it just a confluence of events: The US-China tech war (preventing expansion of Chinese factories, causing stock-piling from companies fearful of sanctions), factory shutdowns due to the pandemic, unforseen demand in certain areas (work from home equipment, TVs, GPUs for cryptomining), random accidents like this one.

londons_explore 6y ago
All an effect of a lack of a futures market in IC fabrication capacity. That means nobody has a global view of future demand (since today most contracts are secret) and cannot invest in capacity accordingly.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  One could fear there to be massive overcapacity in a short time (1-2 years). As mainland Chinese alternative capacity comes online and when some of the weirder demand peters out (GPUs for mining). My intuition is also that there is less pressure in the "let's buy the latest phone game" than there used to be. (For example I am using a 3 year old iPhone X and have no inkling to buy a new one).
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    No need to fear it - the futures market will find people willing to shoulder that risk for a price.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  And a futures market would require capacity to be a complete commodity. Which I don't think it is.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Stocks are not a single commodity, but stocks in thousands of companies over many exchanges, and there exist indexes and ETFs to try to aggregate them. The same can be done with slightly different silicon fabrication facilities. For example, a company who needs their chips manufacturered at Facility A or B, but cannot use facility C would buy a futures contract letting them do that.

throwaway4good 6y ago

HN is funny sometimes. You guys seem to either want a battered down Toyota that you can fix with a screw driver or the absolute latest AI-powered Tesla 666.

bitcharmer 6y ago
What's your point? The two cars cover drastically different use cases.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  How are they different use cases? Transportation and showing off? City life and the apocalypse?
  - crubier 6y ago
    Yes
  - protomyth 6y ago
    Well, I'm pretty sure a Tesla isn't going to be a good winter car in North Dakota, but I guess that's the same use case as the apocalypse.
downrightmike 6y ago
Ah yes, because HN is just one guy
- teekert 6y ago
  Well, he described me. I also doubted between an iPhone 12 mini and a PinePhone (the FairPhone was also in the mix). Both (or all 3) appealing for very different reasons.
  - ianai 6y ago
    Would anyone grief a car mechanic for owning a miata, a truck, and probably half a dozen vehicles in total? One form of being a professional involves being an enthusiast.

turbinerneiter 6y ago

I work in a tiny R&D company, mostly building prototypes, and currently, _every single project_ we have that involves hardware is in some sort affected by the general semi-shortage + Mouser (being a Texan company) delivery delays. We weren't able to buy the _150_ micro-controllers we needed for a tiny series production, I'm currently waiting for a literal handful of crimp terminals to be shipped, the 220Vto12V AC/DC converter I normally use is unobtainium. No PS5. No graphics cards. No Vaccines. 6 month wait for bicycles. The biggest LSD producer in Europe got caught, so no LSD either. It's like in communism, but you still have to pay rent.

toxik 6y ago
If you only knew how offensive this sounds to people who did live and starve under communism.
- wlll 6y ago
  Perhaps you could ask them and report back?
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  Sorry you took offense. It's a joke. One that criticizes communism btw.
  - toxik 6y ago
    It's pretty obviously not a joke, but a trivialization by comparison.
    - turbinerneiter 6y ago
      You have full authority over the meaning of my words.
      - toxik 6y ago
        I never claimed to have authority, but neither do you. A message is as it is received, not as it is intended.

downrightmike 6y ago

Thesis: automakers were already making more cars far above and beyond demand before 2020, they used the pandemic to cut their part orders and now have repercussions from that, but in reality, that is what they want. They need a lack of supply and for current stock to be used up before they will be profitable.

xadhominemx 6y ago
Absolutely not. Automotive factories are only profitable when run at high utilization. If ICs are short, then factories cannot run at high utilization.

buescher 6y ago

What's with Japanese chip fabs catching fire? It's very odd that Renesas was producing some chips for AKM at that plant after the AKM plant caught fire. From earlier this year: "Renesas steps up and lends capacity to AKM after the fire" https://evertiq.com/design/49481 https://evertiq.com/design/49481

jeffbee 6y ago
Semiconductor fabrication involves pyrophoric vapors. It's pretty dangerous.
- buescher 6y ago
  That's a good answer for "why would a fab catch fire?", not as good an answer for "why would two fabs in Japan that were producing some of the same chips catch fire?". But as they say, twice is coincidence.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Right, I'm not taking at face value the claim that Japan is somehow more prone to these fires.
    - buescher 6y ago
      Where did you see that claim?
fomine3 6y ago
> The fire was caused by plating equipment in one of the buildings due to a surge in current, https://www.eetimes.com/fire-destroys-part-of-renesas-fab/ https://www.eetimes.com/fire-destroys-part-of-renesas-fab/

froh 6y ago

I wonder when in-vehicle computers come in standard sizes and with standard ports. like 4x gb eth, 8x can, 3x hdmi, 2x usb something along such lines. just like you buy another system from another vendor for your data centre, if your usual supplier happens to have production issues. this would also simplify computer power performance updates, to dunno go from level 2 to level 3 autonomy (assuming sensors are there already). the vehicle part of the vehicle easily lasts 10-15 years. such standardized vehicle computer infrastructure would not only make automotive vendors more independent from board and soc fluctuations, it would keep the car fresh for a longer period of time, and allow for performance software after-market sales. why not? what am I missing?