0: How Toyota Steered Clear of the Chip Shortage Mess
Most of automotive does not need AMSL 10nm and below fabs. They need robust 200nm to 300nm chips.
This may yield car redesigns with less touchscreen dependence, simpler electronics in the essential systems, and an "infotainment" system that's less integrated with the vehicle and can be added or replaced later. Already, some new cars have shipped with a blank plate in place of the entertainment system.
There's a mindset that electric cars have to be more complicated. This is strange, because managing the batteries and motors is far simpler than managing an IC engine.
[1] https://www.programbusiness.com/news/toyota-succumbs-chip-sh...
I'd personally see that as a major improvement.
The highly integrated infotainment systems are going to make a lot of these vehicles feel obsolete before their time.
Most of the pieces are already there. The only problem is that they're proprietary.
I'm currently designing with STM32 parts and bought the last hundred available anywhere in the world, but that's only enough for a field trial, not for production. The only ones left in any quantity at at all are the insanely high pin count BGAs and chip-scale packages... no way.
I looked at TI, NXP and Microchip parts too. There's plenty of older 8-bit microcontrollers available, so if you want an AVR or similar I think you'll be fine because they're on older processes that aren't in as much demand.
If there really is an alternative from a "smaller player", I'm all ears.
Definitely shortages on regulators as well, although that's outside my area.
They didn't need to. The initial disruption was only a few weeks. The problem is that once companies saw that there would be a shortage, they started buying up all the supplies they could to rapidly build up buffers, which increases the demand for those supplies worsening the shortage, which in turn means even larger buffers are required. It's a vicious cycle that all could have been avoided.
It's impractical to keep 12 months worth of supplies for manufacturing, even when you don't try to do lean manufacturing - just plain old manufacturing. It's something you need to finance, parts getting obsolete and product designs in some categories iterate every year or two.
We just need to deal with this new reality. You can do your best to avoid the worst case scenario but it is after all a statistical inevitability, so you just ride through it.
As I said on another comment here, though, this is going to have long standing effects on the other end of the disruption. We're going to be left with huge over capacity, unclaimed stocks and companies that couldn't produce parts will have their customers design out their parts for whatever else they can get their hands on. This is a golden opportunity for the smaller players in the industry. How giants like ST, TI and NXP will deal with this long term - I'm not quite sure. Many companies in 2021 and possibly well into 2022 who would normally design their products with TI parts will not do that because they can't even get samples, let along ramp up production.