Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year,

Every single fabless semiconductor designer failed to predict demand because their customers lied to them. The car industry pulled a really dick move last year, and then pulled an even more dick move in the opposite direction, and now everyone is screwed. Back in early 2020 the car manufacturers decided that demand for cars would go down, and because they have a religious aversion to keeping any stock, cancelled lots of orders with their vendors, screwing said vendors over. Their vendors could not afford their fab slots because automotive is such a big part of their revenue, so they cancelled their fab slots. Those slots were happily sold on to entertainment and computing customers, who anticipated a jump in demand due to people staying home more. So far so normal. However, the car industry got it badly wrong - people, afraid of public transit, started buying more cars rather than less. The car industry, being screwed due to their just-in-time religion of zero stock, was faced with their production lines stopping so they called up all their vendors, and asked for those orders back, and some more on top. The vendors then tried to get their fab slots back, and were told to come back next year. Some of them ended up buying other fabless IC designers out of their slots, causing the problem to spread. Others cancelled their existing orders to other customers, and auctioned off their existing inventory to increasingly desperate car manufacturers at a 6x to 8x premium. Anyone who was not prepared to pay that or didn't act fast enough was screwed. From that point on, a bunch of companies that depend on those lines of microcontrollers had to rapidly redesign their product to use another device, taking even more devices off the market with unplanned demand. The users of those devices then had to move to others, causing even more availability cascades. This is how two nasty moves by the car industry caused global market disruption in a number of industries that depend on electronics. This is not a normal "demand has increased, and industry can't keep up" event, it's elephants dancing and trampling everyone else underneath. This is further aggravated by the top three automotive semiconductor suppliers (NXP, Renesas, Infineon) having their facilities destroyed in two unrelated disastrous events - a fire at Renesas' wafer processing plant, and Texas freezing over, destroying NXP's and Infineon's fabs through cleanroom contamination and process interruption. Those events took out months' worth of production, and destroyed product that had already been sold before manufacture. This would have been recoverable in a normal market, because distributor stock could hold a couple months, but in this case it was game over for non-automotive customers as all distributor stock was already gone by then. I see this in my work every day now - customers coming to me for help with redesigning products to use a different microcontroller, or help with sourcing parts from unusual sources because their normal channels are gone. I've been in this industry a long time and never seen anything like this before. This is not a failure of supply chain analysis and projection on the part of the fabless semicon vendors. This is their biggest customers fucking their vendors over not once but twice by lying to them about their own demand.