I imagine one end result of this supply squeeze is that a lot of bespoke or legacy parts will be finally removed from designs that have up until now been "good enough". To cite the most common example, vehicle manufacturers' most common supply pain-point is ICs built on a ~200nm process, which was state of the art between 1996-2000.

I understand it makes sense to move slower for chips embedded in long-life devices, and they need additional validation; however, at some point if lead times are long enough and prices stay high it becomes reasonable to start that extended validation process on newer chips.

This would hopefully mean consumers start seeing infotainment with much better performance in the second half of 2022, and this lines up with industry expectations of when the squeeze will lift.

There are one to two multimedia SoCs in a car. There are hundreds to thousands of mixed-signal and power ASICs in a car. Those are on large nodes, not because they're outdated, but because that's what you use for power and mixed signal. TSMC N7 is great for that 2 GHz ARM quad-core SoC, but garbage when you need to drive a piezo fuel valve.

> To cite the most common example, vehicle manufacturers' most common supply pain-point is ICs built on a ~200nm process, which was state of the art between 1996-2000.

I'm a total layman, but that might be misunderstanding "state of the art." Larger feature sizes may be better for their applications if they allow the parts to be more reliable.

I meant the node itself was state of the art. The application reliability is important, but in practice will be balanced against cost of goods -- just like how consumer PCs use non-ECC memory and try to handle it in software (or just decide occasional crashes are acceptable), there would likely be additional failure compensation added in other areas to adjust for otherwise cheaper parts on a smaller process node.

And if you think a car company wouldn't use a less-reliable part because of safety concerns, look at the Pinto: Ford knew it had a tendency to, erm, explode, but calculated paying off lawsuits would be cheaper than fixing the problem. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Cost%E2%80%93benefi...

Infotainment systems have multiple-year lead times and validating a PCB change can run just as long. Unless you're Tesla.