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The Chip Shortage Recovery Has Turned a Corner

Daniel Nenni

Admin
Staff member
Semiconductor delivery times have shortened, but they remain higher than prepandemic levels.
By Peter Hanbury and Anne Hoecker March 23, 2023

  • Chip Shortage Recovery Has Turned a Corner.png

Delivery times for most types of semiconductors have come down over the past year, but they remain nearly three times higher than before the pandemic-induced shortage, according to Bain & Company analysis of data from LevaData. On average, across chip types, delivery lead times were 27 weeks in January, 9 weeks below their January 2022 peak.

However, the shortage continues to hit the industry unevenly. Lead times for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and microcontroller units (MCUs) remain high. Optoelectronics lead times haven’t changed much since the pandemic. Analog chip delivery times were on the rise last year due to automotive demand and long qualifying lead times, but since October they’ve receded sharply; time will tell whether this decline is a true reset. Just as the shortage’s effects have differed by chip type, so too will the time to recover vary significantly by end market, based on the types of chips each industry uses.

 
It really is perplexing. The foundries are at 70% utilization (optimistic) yet there are still shortages? Is the supply chain that bad? Lesson learned, absolutely, hopefully.
 
It really is perplexing. The foundries are at 70% utilization (optimistic) yet there are still shortages? Is the supply chain that bad? Lesson learned, absolutely, hopefully.

As a supplier to FABS we still got multiple month lead times and the work still coming in at a good rate of knots.
Therefore there is some mismatch somewhere in the chain
 
It really is perplexing. The foundries are at 70% utilization (optimistic) yet there are still shortages? Is the supply chain that bad? Lesson learned, absolutely, hopefully.
Some food for thought:

What's the utilization of 40nm - 250nm at the foundries?

Do you think the foundries are the only bottleneck? Or that chip companies with their own fabs are operating as low as 70% utilization?

Do you think if the MCU companies had enough capacity throughout the whole manufacturing process, that they would turn on production high enough to churn through their order backlog at maximum speed?
 
Some food for thought:

What's the utilization of 40nm - 250nm at the foundries?

Do you think the foundries are the only bottleneck? Or that chip companies with their own fabs are operating as low as 70% utilization?

Do you think if the MCU companies had enough capacity throughout the whole manufacturing process, that they would turn on production high enough to churn through their order backlog at maximum speed?

This is where the company i work for operates and we are doing very well at the minute.
In fact FAB utilisation likley lower the better for us as that usually mean someone have to come up with new product to try and plug this gap.
Not all sectors of Semicon move in unison is what I have seen through my time in the business.
 
Just curious: what kind of equipment?
We are in mask business.

Since beginning of COVID business booming in all levels we operate at.

High FAB utilisation if just running old product is not good for us , so to me the mask business does not correlate directly with Foundry, this is why I am at a loss sometime when I read some of the questions asked by "analysts" at our earnings calls.

Medical and automotive is a big boost for us as new products launched all the time past 2 or 3 years and this is what we need. Not FABS fully utilised used existing product
 
Some food for thought:

What's the utilization of 40nm - 250nm at the foundries?

Do you think the foundries are the only bottleneck? Or that chip companies with their own fabs are operating as low as 70% utilization?

Do you think if the MCU companies had enough capacity throughout the whole manufacturing process, that they would turn on production high enough to churn through their order backlog at maximum speed?

I was told that 7nm and 5nm have the lowest utilization numbers right now but all nodes are below 2022 numbers and not fully utilized. UMC is only mature nodes and they are having a very bad year thus far.

I don't know about IDMs. Maybe they are jammed up but most IDMs use foundries as well so maybe they will move more over to TSMC.

I have always felt that foundries were not the weak link in the supply chain but I do think the supply chain will be stronger as a result of the pandemic.
 
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