Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs

Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by lnsru on Monday January 31, 2022 @02:42AM (#30145519)

While you could use newspaper as a substitute for toilet a paper some company has nothing as as a replacement. New part means costly re-certification of the whole product. No parts means one is out of business. So buying everything that is available on the market looks like very good decision from business perspective.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by hvidgaard on Monday January 31, 2022 @03:59AM (#30145978)

If you're that dependent on components that there is no replacement for, then perhaps buy enough stock to last you through a redesign and recertification is in order. Having a contingency plan for such scenarios seems like a no brainer.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by lnsru on Monday January 31, 2022 @04:15AM (#30146080)

There are sooo many no brainers, that bureaucratic monstrosities also known as Big Corps just can’t get right. I work for one and more than half of the daily problems are home made and were simple no brainers elsewhere.

I got all my electronic parts on time for my private development and first small manufacturing run. It is indeed no brainer.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by hvidgaard on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:20AM (#30146500)

It's because they value short term gain over long term gain and stability. I see it all the time in software development too.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by vkou on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:05AM (#30146400)

I'm pretty sure that whatever business you work for has no planned replacement for their local power company ceasing to provide electricity.

This doesn't mean they should go out and build their own gas peaker plant.

We live in a society, and no man is an island. You can't control everything you depend on. Sure, you can control some things you depend on, but that's a long, and expensive rabbit hole. Hoarding twenty years of canned food and seventy thousand rounds of ammuniton is all well and good, unless doing so puts you in a situation where you can't pay rent.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by hvidgaard on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:17AM (#30146479)

Nice straw man. But I'll go with it for no other reason that I hope no one believes in that absurdity as an argument against planning for component supply issues. Issues that businesses have experienced time and time again since we began mass producing transistors.

That is because it's a utility that source power from several producers. The risk of no power what so ever for a prolonged time is not something to even be considered. Should that happen, society as we know it is probably at risk and my job is no longer important at all. Oh, and someone actually do plan for intermittent power delivery failure including having two different outside sources for power, a battery backup and diesel generators, data centers come to mind.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by FeepingCreature on Monday January 31, 2022 @06:42AM (#30146973)

Don't big businesses often have Diesel generators to keep power to essential devices going through outages?

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by vkou on Monday January 31, 2022 @01:05PM (#30151520)

I don't mean a two-day power interruption, I mean a two-year power interruption.

And if they intend to feed the generator in perpetuity, I'll happily shift the goalposts to some other critical supplier not providing their services.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by erik_seaberg on Monday January 31, 2022 @05:14AM (#30146462)

I don’t know that massive datacenters are truly a good investment for my employer, but at least we have several zones in two regions in case of power/network/natural disaster issues.

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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by selimthegrim on Monday January 31, 2022 @08:06AM (#30147477)

You’d better tell the city of New Orleans that.

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