Comments by "Siana Gearz" (@SianaGearz) on "Where The Real Chip Shortage Is" video.

@964cuplove it's millimetres. The silicon crystal is manufactured either 20cm thicc or 30cm thiccccc (and very tall, those are impressive things in their own right, kill you easily) and then sliced, that's the wafer size. Problem is any equipment works with one size or the other, you can't like peacemeal upgrade the factory.
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The SAM is of course an inherited Atmel chip. Indeed all Atmel, Microchip, NXP, Nuvoton, STM low-end micros are sold out a year in advance and have been for a year and something, everything under $3, most things under $7 as well. And it's been a lot tougher to work around than shortages of higher end chips, which are still kinda available. Also special function analogue/linear semiconductors of particular kinds are hit hard. Chinese domestic chips have better availability. Maybe more 45-28nm utilisation? I do think maxing 28nm and node shrinking designs needs to be an intermediate goal, i feel, not adding another 90nm fab. But i think more 28nm fabs won't go to waste.
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@Conservator. per transistor cost bottoms out at 28nm, so maybe there's a way to regain some of the cost advantage vs. 130nm? It's just that there wasn't enough pressure to build more, not enough to offset the risks. You do have a problem that IO area probably won't shrinkify much at all though.
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That has negligible effect on legacy chips, where the real shortage is. It will lessen the pressure on the cutting edge chips though, but it will not decrease actual manufacturing volume of these chips, just more of these products will be available to regular consumers. To that end, it will not affect the shortage as an industry wide problem affecting all dependent industries at all, or rather it will, but only after those lucrative markets are saturated, so years later!
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@alexforget Not much difference really, i would say...
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There's a little problem with that - there's only so much you can shrinkify a chip with mere several tens thousands of gates before it gets dominated by unshrinkable padspace and IO. But i do think some movement needs to be happening in that direction. Maybe dropping more peripherals into the chip, like at least digital IO rerouting, IO statemachines like on RP2040 and new atmegas, small FPGAs and whatnot, just to eliminate a bunch of little junk chips on the board. As long as these are purely digital and use the same pin drive circuits as already present, these should shrinkify right along.
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I don't know for certain, but as far as i can see here from Europe, diminishingly little or not at all? Chinese semiconductors and rest of the world are like a semi permeable space, like, Chinese stuff has some availability (some product lines are canned) but all the US, Euro, JP, even Taiwan companies have pretty much ZERO availability of trailing edge chips. Chinese electronics companies use Chinese stuff and classic global stuff, after all they learn from the rest, non-Chinese companies use non-Chinese stuff almost exclusively, with very little spilling in, say via Diodes Inc acquisitions and this and that, but really nothing all too important there. These days people around the globe are starting to familiarise themselves with Chinese domestic chips in part even just to have an alternative available, and Chinese companies are starting to write English datasheets more than they used to.
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@roro Ya doing business with Chinese suppliers is often a good time, like they'll often find a way to accommodate you, they're quick on their feet, they spot an opportunity and they go for it; while EU companies usually try to find an excuse to just not work with a smaller customer or unusual orders, they find themselves a comfy spot somewhere on the periphery of a handful of large clients and just stick to it. Naturally things sometimes don't work out perfectly but they're generally willing to cut through it and work it out eventually. Good luck to your electronics business, happy you lot have been able to keep it afloat. Hope the politics doesn't get in your way too badly, i know there are... tensions.
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@mathew00 i have the solution... YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS.
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@TheMichaelJu I am a computer engineer and worked in automotive and medical but no longer do at the moment, but why would you be making it about me. You're skirting the question entirely. SoCs CPUs GPUs DRAM and whatnot are 45, 28nm or higher end. They don't directly compete for the fab space with 130nm 32-bit micro or a 350nm 8-bit micro. And those things are exactly the things that you can't buy. Every typical NXP LPC, STM32, ATSAM, even Nuvoton in the sub-$5-ish range (depends) are sold out a year in advance. Where are THESE chips if you claim there is no shortage in specifically this area?
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It's not. For the chip shown for example, none of its direct competitors that i can think of have good availability, almost all are gone completely, and a bare handful are just borderline available. Many achievable redesign opportunities have been picked pretty hard. If more designs transition to the available ones, those will be sold out a year in advance as well in short order. Industrywide shortage is an industrywide shortage. Your suggestion would make sense if there was a giant stockpile and overproduction of some functionally comparable chips but there really isn't. We probably need more yield per wafer. Maybe same function chips on smaller and cuter nodes. Not just all the 130nm stuff. But when that happens, can packaging even keep pace? Breaking out of an industrywide shortage is HARD.
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@jan.tichavsky rp2040 has external firmware and no provision for ROM encryption, which makes it nominally unsuitable for most commercial products. And open source projects often get fouled by its glitchy ADC, which is not entirely surprising of a company with no such design experience, they'll get it right eventually.
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Clock oscillator, microphone, accelerometer, magnetic field sensor, pressure sensor. A lot of semi mechanical devices can be made smaller, higher performance and more efficient, produced as a MEMS semiconductor.
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@LMB222 It's not that ESP's chips aren't used at scale, a lot of iot power products like colour changing lightbulbs and remote switchable power sockets used them at scale; then again these are products with... shall we say no particular expectation of reliability, often just borderline compliance to basic safety norms, and many of those have even since switched to even cheaper and wonkier chips, they plain don't care. You simply can't sustain a semiconductor company like that on hobbyists, but you can sustain it on kilotons of future e-waste.
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But oversupply is a problem for the semiconductor industry, it's a blessing for the electronics industry. As it stands now, the shortage is short-term a benefit to semiconductor industry, long-term hazardous to semiconductor industry players who drag their feet to the benefit of those who are quicker, and extremely painful to borderline murderous to electronics industry.
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Well where are the chips then, that have 50, 55 week lead times, according to you?
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@symbolsandsystems the chips in question are hardly suitable for a secret purpose. I'll grant you though that their underlying manufacturing capacities are suitable, but also, a lot of people would have to know and notice, and no whistleblowers seriously? The way I see it the shortage was a long time coming and it's a part of natural boom, overproduction, recession & scarcity cycle that forms the fabric of capitalism. You have to think of the 20s where an unrestrained boom caused overproduction caused a whole economic crash called The Great Depression. The current scarcity was a long time coming and was pulled forward by a couple years and amplified by recent events, when the global demand in household electronics jumped up a sudden and unprecedented 20%. But that's just my opinion, I don't have actually hard evidence to say that this is how it is. And I wager a guess, you don't have hard evidence for your position either.
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If there's no shortage, then where are the chips though? Have you tried buying a reel of them through any reputable distributor? Or even half-way reputable? All these microcontrollers made on 90-350nm nodes are various shades of gone, with typical lead time of a year.
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Not whatever happens to be available, they're made in-house at a 350nm node, it takes years of effort to transition to a new node and fab so i suspect it was never done. Consider, it is not synthesizable, it's a hand taped out hard core; and it cannot be truly synthesizable due to various analogue functions - ADC, comparator, BOD, oscillator, etc, expected pullup/pulldown current and so on.
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@NoNameAtAll2 It's presumably cheaper, and how much benefit are you really going to get from producing a chip with mere tens thousands of gates on a higher end fab? You can shrink the logic but the IO circuits won't get shrunk. Most products, and there's really a countless number of them, need maybe just one very low end chip and some power semiconductors.
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@paulschreiber9384 The Pico boards? Probably. RP2040 chips are available in 500 and 3400 reel quantities if that's how you want to roll. Supplies are a little limited, if you want to buy 5 reels, you might be in a little trouble.
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I think the most used ancient chip might actually be a TL431. Obviously i'm not the first to voice such an opinion, but i have seen maybe two 555s in a product so far in my hands, but i have had dozens or low hundreds of TL431s in my hands.
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Surprising? 2 years is a short time and the crisis has been a long time coming and wasn't done anything about. The boom and bust cycles are pretty much inherent to capitalism.
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I wonder how long a lead time for a die shrink is. It seems likely to me that the PS2 logic was designed in parallel for the stable node and the future cutting edge node, but of course the future node couldn't be manufactured... until the future came about. It was likely too expensive to make systems on a node which would be out of date by release - beefier PSU needed, more silicon consumed, reliability compromise due to higher temperature, all that. And it was likely too expensive to wait for new process to make early devkits - the cost of opportunity is the highest possible cost.
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Not very first, sorry.
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Your washing machine or your car are rotting children's minds? You better get your mind checked. The shortage affects the hardest chips which are maybe nominally faster than 386, but don't have nearly as much memory, often kilobytes. In high tech electronics, utilisation of 90nm, 130nm chips isn't critical, but it's what a lot of the pretty much invisible stuff runs on.
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@Graham_Wideman Those low pin count atsam chips that the video starts off with as an example, you could get them really cheaply.
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