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.
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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...