Apparently the automotive industry has been afflicted with this chip shortage recently that everyone has started complaining a lot about it. Can someone explain what’s the reason for it? Where’s the chips normally coming from and why there’s a shortage now?
I’m curious to know why only the automotive industry is particularly affected. I thought all phones and computers use chips too. Why are they not affected, or are they? Thanks.

 

"A global shortage of semiconductors"

sums it up nicely... .


https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wo...ks-11614020156

"Chips have been hard to come by for auto makers and consumers, causing difficulties in a range of industries. The cause seems to be a combination of increased demand as people scooped up electronics during the COVID-19 pandemic, limited manufacturing capacity to meet that demand, and the U.S.-China trade war."


so, just your normal supply and demand...

 

• COVID-19 hampered production (staffing, supply lines). Intel makes chips in the USA but a ton are made in Asia (Korea, Taiwan, China, etc.)
• Auto makers saw the initial huge drop in demand (remember March/April 2020?), cancelled/shifted down lot of their buys.....hence chip makers shifted production/sales to other industries
• Phone/computer/electronics surged in demand (laptops, computers, phones, TVs, etc.) due to most people staying home and needing to work from home. I personally saw TV prices go up. If you're into the computer building world, you KNOW how bad parts are short right now...this affects a TON of industries not just car makers
• Auto demand was not nearly down as long or as hard as predicted....chip makers can't just switch on a dime, you already have contracts/orders sent to other companies already, basically TSMC is running at 100% capacity (massive foundry in Taiwan)
• Shortage likely lasting into 2022 from what I've been reading
• I personally was going to buy a car this year, possibly, BUT seeing this shortage I am now holding off on buying ANY car until about 2023...it is a horribly over-priced auto market right now

 

Just try to buy a graphics card for a computer. Same thing. Extortion if you can find one.

 

FWIW, I used to work for a chip company (Atmel) and your post sums it up very well. A friend of mine is still in the business (MicroChip) and we were speaking about the chip fab slots recently and it's pretty bad.
Currently the US only has ~20% of the world-wide chip fabrication, few decades ago it used to be ~40%.
It's not so much current capacity (that hasn't changed much) but other companies reserved their chip fab runs that were open, and some fab runs take up to 20 weeks.
And increasing capacity? Alot of the fab equipment has lead times from Applied Materials and others from 18-24 months. Some of the latest wafer steppers ASML and Cannon are out 2+ years for delivery.

 

Interesting. Thanks for that insight. Yeah I imagine with the ever shrinking size of nodes/fab process (AMD with the 7nm...and upcoming 5nm and even smaller..) it is not surprising at all that it takes long time to get things churned out...electronics so complicated these days and not easy to meet demand for something that you already have contracted out for.

I read that TSMC is looking at possibly building plants in Arizona...and of course that will take a looong time.

Not surprised if this continues into 2022 also....bad deal for alot of industries and consumers will need to practice delayed gratification.

 

Yeah, what's truly crazy and perhaps out of touch I am with current chip tech (last chip design I led was in 2004 was for a 95nm technology Layer2 switch fabric chip).

So last I remember a state of the art wafer stepper was ~$50M about a decade ago. Today? I was curious and checked the latest model from AMSL, a NXE:3400B.
It can supposedly step and resolve lithography for 5nm and 7nm with it's extreme uV light source and alignment. Cost each $176M, and can only produce 125 wafers (300mm) per layer per hour so figure TSMC will be buying many to the tune of billions.

I was amazed when the cost of a single state of the art fab hit $1B in the 2000's, now TSMC's Arizona planned fab (240k fab'ed 300mm wafers per year) is expected to be $12B.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-euv-tools-order

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willysh...h=2bf4c9a12340

 

^ Are those the machines that operate at deep vacuum to manufacture the parts?

 

No, the steppers work in a clean environment (IIRC sometimes partial vacuum but often N2) but not vacuum. The steppers provide the pattern which is the negative for printing the various layers of material.

The machines that work in extreme vacuum are the Chemical Vapor Deposition (CVD) which add layers of material (insulating and conductive) with epitaxy process to the silicon wafers.
Once the base silicon active layers are processed (where the transistors and cap cells for DRAM) then the layers that are deposited above those are insulating (silicon dioxide) and conductive (copper and tungsten) that interconnect all those transistors.

 

Damn...I want to watch some videos on how it's made for this stuff. Sounds super interesting.

 

Infineon's 13 minute YoutTube is excellent

 

Pretty good recap, it's gonna be awhile before the various shortages are alleviated
These also explains lean manufacturing and Kanban

 

 

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/t...on_news_static