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Auto chip shortages are due to the increased volume of chips per car, and a delay in restarting production to meet the surge in demand, says Analog Devices CEO Vincent Roche.
www.barrons.com
With semis becoming critical in almost every area of the economy at an ever accelerating rate which I call the "Great Acceleration" the semiconductor industry is going to see shortages in many areas as not only the number of uses faces ever accelerating growth, but the markets themselves. We are going see and have already are seeing ever more and creative uses of semis on top of the growth in already established markets. All this presents a tidal wave of opportunities for semis of all types, not just traditional chips. The solar and battery areas are but one example of this and both are growing and advancing at ever faster rates with obsolescence of older systems adding to the demand at an ever accelerating rate. The speed of obsolescence is only adding to the demand, adding a second significant driver to the ever expanding market for semis. For any business plan in almost all industries, the rate of change in technologies and their increasing penetration along with obsolescence has to be taken into account and a vision of radical changes technology can bring on has to be central to any business plan. Shortages of critical semis will have to factored in as part of any business equation.
Simple solution, move your dusty old designs up to 28nm or even 16nm (300mm fabs) where there is plenty of capacity. And who is buying all of these new cars during the pandemic? Good news for the dusty old fab people though. All for the greater semiconductor good, absolutely.
The shortage situation can get worse toward the second half of 2021 if the global economy coming back due to the vaccine deployment. The shortage won't be limited to automobile parts because too much demand are competing a finite amount of capacity in a short period of time. From my understanding, the second tier of foundries in Taiwan are swamped by orders coming from multiple industry segments.
Simple solution, move your dusty old designs up to 28nm or even 16nm (300mm fabs) where there is plenty of capacity. And who is buying all of these new cars during the pandemic? Good news for the dusty old fab people though. All for the greater semiconductor good, absolutely.
How much time will the migration or redesign take?
Another challenge is too many orders come in a short period of time or come just too late. In this situation, foundries have to resort to allocation policy.
Ford has ordered a month-long production halt at one of its plants in Germany, the latest sign that a global shortage of computer chips is putting carmakers under increasing pressure and threatening their recovery from the pandemic.
Simple solution, move your dusty old designs up to 28nm or even 16nm (300mm fabs) where there is plenty of capacity. And who is buying all of these new cars during the pandemic? Good news for the dusty old fab people though. All for the greater semiconductor good, absolutely.
Shrinking from something previous to 28nm or 16nm probably means a switch from single- to double-patterning. Combine that with the shrink and you've more than doubled your tooling costs for the production run. The EDA for double patterning is more expensive, too, which will be trouble for the smaller design shops that tend to do replacements for obsolete parts; there's lots of freeware tools, older tools that don't have a subscription license, and/or... What should I call them? B-grade tools? Second-fiddle tools?
Can an obsolete part replacement justify all these added costs with higher volume? Probably only in sparing cases, indeed.
Shrinking from something previous to 28nm or 16nm probably means a switch from single- to double-patterning. Combine that with the shrink and you've more than doubled your tooling costs for the production run. The EDA for double patterning is more expensive, too, which will be trouble for the smaller design shops that tend to do replacements for obsolete parts; there's lots of freeware tools, older tools that don't have a subscription license, and/or... What should I call them? B-grade tools? Second-fiddle tools?
Can an obsolete part replacement justify all these added costs with higher volume? Probably only in sparing cases, indeed.
I don't think it's simple but its certainly doable. I'm not sure what sort of migration tools TSMC has, but if they could offer an automated way to port over designs I think it would be a pretty significant opportunity for them.
I don't think it's simple but its certainly doable. I'm not sure what sort of migration tools TSMC has, but if they could offer an automated way to port over designs I think it would be a pretty significant opportunity for them.
In the recent TSMC earnings call, C.C. Wei did mention that they were working with the customer to move some of their mature nodes to advanced nodes to help alleviate the shortage. They, unfortunately, didn't mention any automated way to port over designs to advanced nodes.
As to who the "customer" may be....a recent Bloomberg article indicated that General Motors requested the Taiwanese government's help in securing more supply. Tesla (current Samsung Foundry customer) is also rumored to be working with TSMC on the HW 4.0 self-driving chip.
Finally, a truthful headline. Foundries are happy to build more chips given the proper notice. It's called a wafer agreement where all parties agree to a specific wafer quantity over a specific period of time.
My question is when will the pandemic inspired economic collapse really hit automobile manufacturing? Now that we drive a fraction of the miles we did pre pandemic who is rushing to buy new cars? Are the same car people who planned poorly doing it again?
Finally, a truthful headline. Foundries are happy to build more chips given the proper notice. It's called a wafer agreement where all parties agree to a specific wafer quantity over a specific period of time.
My question is when will the pandemic inspired economic collapse really hit automobile manufacturing? Now that we drive a fraction of the miles we did pre pandemic who is rushing to buy new cars? Are the same car people who planned poorly doing it again?
A car built doesn't mean a car sold. I would be concerned that these auto manufacturers have been keeping the lights on for the past several months building up inventory to keep both their own, and their contractor's employees employed, but the output may be lining up in ports or empty lots waiting to be sold. I haven't looked at any of these players' days-of-inventory statements, but my memory is that a decade plus back, when the automakers had a bail-out, they were pushing the output on to their dealership partners regardless if they wanted it or not. The market for secondary (used) car sales tanked because there was such a glut of new cars, along with purchase incentives from the automakers, that there was really no value to buying a 3-4 year old vehicle coming off of lease instead. Anything that was older than that (but not old enough to be considered 'Classic') was similarly headed to the scrap heaps. I personally had a vehicle with a bluebook value of about $5000 that I sold for about 25% of that after unsuccessfully listing it for almost two years. We'll see if there are a rush of incentives for purchasing a 2021MY vehicle this upcoming spring before the annual auto shows get going.
Germany has asked Taiwan to persuade Taiwanese manufacturers to help ease a shortage of semiconductor chips in the auto sector which is hampering its fledgling economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
It's my hope that auto industry can finally recognize that semiconductor manufacturing and supply chain doesn't work like an online pizza order and delivery business.
For the record: TSMC experienced a 27% surge in automotive in Q4 2020. In Q3 2020 automotive was down 23%, in Q2 2020 automotive was down 13%, and in Q1 2020 automotive was down 1%. So, just a rough calculation, automotive ordered 10% less wafers from TSMC in 2020. Where is the shortage again? Sounds more to me like the automotive companies are guilty of bad planning.
Bottom line: TSMC builds/maintains capacity based on wafer agreements. Clearly there is a wafer agreement problem here if there is a shortage of automotive chips after a down year. Or there is a chicken little journalism problem.
And notice that Tesla is not on the list even though they have a very high chip content. The semiconductor industry started the transition from 8" wafers to the more cost effective 12" wafers at .13micron. Unfortunately old school automotive did not get that memo and still use mature nodes. Tesla and the other leading edge automotive companies are buying 12" wafers. Just another reason Tesla is disrupting the automotive dinosaurs and for that the semiconductor industry should be grateful!
"GM's Global Purchasing and Supply chain organization has managed to fend off plant disruptions until now in part due to getting a jump start on the problem, a source familiar with the matter said, but declined to be named because he is not authorized to share information with the media."
It's funny. A group of people did bad planning and bad execution but now they claimed they are the hero?!
To be fair, the pandemic tossed us into uncharted semiconductor territory. A learning experience for sure.
Bottom line: The economic pundits and forecasting professionals seriously under estimated the buoyancy of the semiconductor industry, absolutely. Electronic devices are more critical to modern life than ever before and semiconductors is where electronics begins, absolutely.
Shortage of other inputs also poses uncertainty for rosy 2021 growth outlook
asia.nikkei.com
It looks more like a demand side issue instead of a manufacturing issue. Too many semi products all want to get preferential treatment at a short period of time.
www.barrons.com
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