Very good article and yes that is what happened. We did not have a wafer shortage problem, we had an allocation problem. Car makers cancelled orders then expected to get in front of the queue with their tiny little orders.
“In the past two years they call me and behave like my best friend,” he told a laughing crowd of TSMC partners and customers in Silicon Valley recently. One automaker called to urgently request 25 wafers, said Wei, who is used to fielding orders for 25,000 wafers. “No wonder you cannot get the support.” CC Wei, TSMC Technical Symposium 2022.
I was there, it was funny, typical CC Wei with his biting humor.
The foundries took advantage of this situation and as they say made a silk purse out of a sows ear. Would there have been a CHIPs Act without the shortage narrative? Would there have been price hikes and CAPEX splurges? I hate to say it but that false narrative was for the greater good of the semiconductor industry, absolutely.
A Toyota electronics engineer said that when they were tearing down Tesla, they were surprised how little electronics it had, and how "dumb" the overal functioning of key systems were.
Over first few generations Teslas had no active suspension elements whatsoever, comparable to economy cars.
Climate control had a single temperature sensor.
There was obviously no dashboards, and separate media system. They are notable microcontroller hogs in regular vehicles.
Lots of buttons were not sitting on buses, but were directly wired to MCUs in dashboards with long wires. So, no semblance of any kind of mesh architecture, or extensive use of CanBUS.
Window/hatch motors were dumb, with no sensors, only limit switches.
Everything outside of powertrain had surprisingly little electronics.
His take: it's an early nineties car with only difference of electric powertrain, and a smartphone for dashboard, which replaced tons of hardware with software.