4 ms·

How much of a buffer can you possibly maintain to deal with a year long economic disruption, which changes both supply (by lockdowns and factories being offline

How much of a buffer can you possibly maintain to deal with a year long economic disruption, which changes both supply (by lockdowns and factories being offline) and demand (by a shift in consumer spending mix and free government money)? It's impractical to keep 12 months worth of supplies for manufacturing, even when you don't try to do lean manufacturing - just plain old manufacturing. It's something you need to finance, parts getting obsolete and product designs in some categories iterate every year or two. We just need to deal with this new reality. You can do your best to avoid the worst case scenario but it is after all a statistical inevitability, so you just ride through it. As I said on another comment here, though, this is going to have long standing effects on the other end of the disruption. We're going to be left with huge over capacity, unclaimed stocks and companies that couldn't produce parts will have their customers design out their parts for whatever else they can get their hands on. This is a golden opportunity for the smaller players in the industry. How giants like ST, TI and NXP will deal with this long term - I'm not quite sure. Many companies in 2021 and possibly well into 2022 who would normally design their products with TI parts will not do that because they can't even get samples, let along ramp up production.

jdavis703 5y ago
Toyota (famous for lean manufacturing) built redundancy in to it’s supply chain and only recently has run in to chip shortages. It may be hard, but it’s certainly possible. 0: How Toyota Steered Clear of the Chip Shortage Mess
- Animats 5y ago
  That article was back in April. Then, in August, "Japan’s largest car maker said Thursday it was cutting production in the country by 40% in September because of a shortage of semiconductors. The company declined to say whether it would shut down plants outside of Japan." Most of automotive does not need AMSL 10nm and below fabs. They need robust 200nm to 300nm chips. This may yield car redesigns with less touchscreen dependence, simpler electronics in the essential systems, and an "infotainment" system that's less integrated with the vehicle and can be added or replaced later. Already, some new cars have shipped with a blank plate in place of the entertainment system. There's a mindset that electric cars have to be more complicated. This is strange, because managing the batteries and motors is far simpler than managing an IC engine. [1] https://www.programbusiness.com/news/toyota-succumbs-chip-shortage-and-shuts-factories https://www.programbusiness.com/news/toyota-succumbs-chip-sh...
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    The shortages are hitting ECUs and body controllers, it isn't just the fancy cabin electronics.
  - VectorLock 5y ago
    >This may yield car redesigns with less touchscreen dependence, simpler electronics in the essential systems, and an "infotainment" system that's less integrated with the vehicle and can be added or replaced later. Already, some new cars have shipped with a blank plate in place of the entertainment system. I'd personally see that as a major improvement. The highly integrated infotainment systems are going to make a lot of these vehicles feel obsolete before their time.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    The car industry really just needs to standardize a connector (USB-C?) and a protocol for an external device to drive the dashboard touchscreen and any relevant physical buttons. Like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, but open and universal.
    - tbrownaw 5y ago
      They already have a standard network bus connecting all the things together. There's even a standard debug port that exposes it, somewhere near the driver seat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics
      - int_19h 5y ago
        Yeah, but can that drive the display? My impression was that it doesn't have the bandwidth for that. Android Auto requires USB-C, although I'm not quite sure what the actual protocol on the wire is (but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same as for USB-C displays in general, just with some extensions). Most of the pieces are already there. The only problem is that they're proprietary.
photojosh 5y ago
> This is a golden opportunity for the smaller players in the industry. How giants like ST, TI and NXP will deal with this long term - I'm not quite sure. Many companies in 2021 and possibly well into 2022 who would normally design their products with TI parts will not do that because they can't even get samples, let along ramp up production. I'm currently designing with STM32 parts and bought the last hundred available anywhere in the world, but that's only enough for a field trial, not for production. The only ones left in any quantity at at all are the insanely high pin count BGAs and chip-scale packages... no way. I looked at TI, NXP and Microchip parts too. There's plenty of older 8-bit microcontrollers available, so if you want an AVR or similar I think you'll be fine because they're on older processes that aren't in as much demand. If there really is an alternative from a "smaller player", I'm all ears.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  MCUs are more of an issue and of course migrating between different families is a huge headache. However the problem extends to other active components too - regulators, interface ICs, sensors, anything really - and there are opportunities to work with the smaller manufacturers there.
  - photojosh 5y ago
    Fair enough, although I'm not sure this is true at our scale or our product type. When designing products for a 20 year industrial product life you really don't want to gamble on chips staying in production. Definitely shortages on regulators as well, although that's outside my area.
jjk166 5y ago
> It's impractical to keep 12 months worth of supplies for manufacturing They didn't need to. The initial disruption was only a few weeks. The problem is that once companies saw that there would be a shortage, they started buying up all the supplies they could to rapidly build up buffers, which increases the demand for those supplies worsening the shortage, which in turn means even larger buffers are required. It's a vicious cycle that all could have been avoided.

jdavis703 5y ago

Toyota (famous for lean manufacturing) built redundancy in to it’s supply chain and only recently has run in to chip shortages. It may be hard, but it’s certainly possible. 0: How Toyota Steered Clear of the Chip Shortage Mess

Animats 5y ago
That article was back in April. Then, in August, "Japan’s largest car maker said Thursday it was cutting production in the country by 40% in September because of a shortage of semiconductors. The company declined to say whether it would shut down plants outside of Japan." Most of automotive does not need AMSL 10nm and below fabs. They need robust 200nm to 300nm chips. This may yield car redesigns with less touchscreen dependence, simpler electronics in the essential systems, and an "infotainment" system that's less integrated with the vehicle and can be added or replaced later. Already, some new cars have shipped with a blank plate in place of the entertainment system. There's a mindset that electric cars have to be more complicated. This is strange, because managing the batteries and motors is far simpler than managing an IC engine. [1] https://www.programbusiness.com/news/toyota-succumbs-chip-shortage-and-shuts-factories https://www.programbusiness.com/news/toyota-succumbs-chip-sh...
- maxerickson 5y ago
  The shortages are hitting ECUs and body controllers, it isn't just the fancy cabin electronics.
- VectorLock 5y ago
  >This may yield car redesigns with less touchscreen dependence, simpler electronics in the essential systems, and an "infotainment" system that's less integrated with the vehicle and can be added or replaced later. Already, some new cars have shipped with a blank plate in place of the entertainment system. I'd personally see that as a major improvement. The highly integrated infotainment systems are going to make a lot of these vehicles feel obsolete before their time.
- int_19h 5y ago
  The car industry really just needs to standardize a connector (USB-C?) and a protocol for an external device to drive the dashboard touchscreen and any relevant physical buttons. Like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, but open and universal.
  - tbrownaw 5y ago
    They already have a standard network bus connecting all the things together. There's even a standard debug port that exposes it, somewhere near the driver seat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-board_diagnostics
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Yeah, but can that drive the display? My impression was that it doesn't have the bandwidth for that. Android Auto requires USB-C, although I'm not quite sure what the actual protocol on the wire is (but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same as for USB-C displays in general, just with some extensions). Most of the pieces are already there. The only problem is that they're proprietary.

photojosh 5y ago

> This is a golden opportunity for the smaller players in the industry. How giants like ST, TI and NXP will deal with this long term - I'm not quite sure. Many companies in 2021 and possibly well into 2022 who would normally design their products with TI parts will not do that because they can't even get samples, let along ramp up production. I'm currently designing with STM32 parts and bought the last hundred available anywhere in the world, but that's only enough for a field trial, not for production. The only ones left in any quantity at at all are the insanely high pin count BGAs and chip-scale packages... no way. I looked at TI, NXP and Microchip parts too. There's plenty of older 8-bit microcontrollers available, so if you want an AVR or similar I think you'll be fine because they're on older processes that aren't in as much demand. If there really is an alternative from a "smaller player", I'm all ears.

flyinglizard 5y ago
MCUs are more of an issue and of course migrating between different families is a huge headache. However the problem extends to other active components too - regulators, interface ICs, sensors, anything really - and there are opportunities to work with the smaller manufacturers there.
- photojosh 5y ago
  Fair enough, although I'm not sure this is true at our scale or our product type. When designing products for a 20 year industrial product life you really don't want to gamble on chips staying in production. Definitely shortages on regulators as well, although that's outside my area.

jjk166 5y ago

> It's impractical to keep 12 months worth of supplies for manufacturing They didn't need to. The initial disruption was only a few weeks. The problem is that once companies saw that there would be a shortage, they started buying up all the supplies they could to rapidly build up buffers, which increases the demand for those supplies worsening the shortage, which in turn means even larger buffers are required. It's a vicious cycle that all could have been avoided.