Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs
by bhouston on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:54AM
(#30150199)
I think in time chips should be fungible commodities. A lot of components, such as DRAM, NAND are fungible. As we move towards more open source tech, like RISC-V, for microcontrollers, maybe many of them become completely fungible as well. Especially if there isn't an infinite variety of them -- I guess the completely custom RISC-V chips won't be fungible, but if one can use an off-the-shelf standardized module, those could be.
Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs
by nomel on Monday January 31, 2022 @03:19PM
(#30153686)
> off-the-shelf standardized module
This doesn't exist now for the same reasons it probably wouldn't work in the future: You can save significant amounts of money if you cut the pieces out of the "standard" that you don't actually need. Chips are cheap to make, in bulk. It's almost entirely a fixed cost/area. That's the magic. So, it's almost always cheaper to make a custom chip than to pay for some bloated standard containing large sections that will never see power, especially when chips are something like 40% of the BOM, for modern cars.
Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs
by 41b696ef1113 on Monday January 31, 2022 @11:06PM
(#30158495)
>... especially when chips are something like 40% of the BOM, for modern cars.
No knowledge of the automotive industry, but that sounds impossibly high.
Re:Chip shortages due to lack of investment in right fabs
by nomel on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @11:59AM
(#30165489)
Sorry, that is high! Somewhere around 20% for low power electronics (not just chips), according to https://www.statista.com/statistics/1248308/share-of-automot...
These chips are not fungible commodities. In the automotive space chips are selected based on a number of things including feature set - how many CAN interfaces does it have, how many GPIO, how many PWM, what kind of brown-out handling, what voltage range, thermal rating, etc... Software is then written where a portion of the code is specific to that chip. There are cases where an OEM get really good pricing on a bigger (overkill) chip and helps a supplier get those at good prices too, but usually they just beat you over the head for the lowest cost. Even if everyone adopted a few larger parts and used just those, they're still usually made by a single chip company.