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Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by tgtweak on Monday January 31, 2022 @10:01AM (#30148604)
This is a fatal mistake that the Automotive (and many, many others) who live, breath and preach JIT/6sigma/lean have made. The methodology simply doesn't work when the lead time for design-to-delivery is 18 months and you need your orders in and volumes committed in order to hope to see them on the market next year.

Fabs do not work on jit/lean order principle - if you up your order volume, you can't simply scale it up on demand the next month - even if your design is done and taped out. Fabs aren't sitting around idly waiting for orders nor are they overprovisioned "just in case".

An example of this would be AMD and TSMC. AMD books capacity 3 years in advance for which TSMC designs the entire fabrication facility around, orders the lithography machines (which have a 12 month lead time and can't scale up on a dime) and assembles and staffs those same facilities to produce the wafers. It's not a general-purpose fab as most think. There are rumors that Apple booked m1 fab capacity (on TSMC 5nm) in 2018. For the chip inside a car for example, it is built on much older process, and when 5 of your biggest customers "JIT" reduce their order volume for the next 3 months you simply put those staff elsewhere (probably on the 6x higher margin cutting edge fab you just got booked and prepaid for) since anyone else who might want that process and capacity has already has their orders being produced.

Due to the sheer capital requirements (and consequent commitments required) and multi-year forecasting involved in simply getting what you think you'll need, let alone having extra, it's not hard to see why a small increase in global demand would cause a dramatic shortage. JIT works in Automotive supply chain where you can request that your bearings get made 10 days before they're delivered to the factory, but not when there is an 18 month latency on "scale up" request/response.

It's applying JIT principles to inherently non-JIT supply chains.

Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by digikata on Monday January 31, 2022 @12:30PM (#30150844)
You can apply the same principles, but you have to adjust the time coefficients to fit the realities of the supplier.
Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by tgtweak on Monday January 31, 2022 @03:23PM (#30153730)
I guess if you account T = 18 months, JIT can still apply.
Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs by bhouston on Monday January 31, 2022 @04:01PM (#30154289)
This is correct. Every type of suppler has different adjustment time based on their own systems. Tooling & upfront design is actually common in a lot of industries, chips just have extreme tooling & upfront design requirements.