All you need to know about the microchip crisis
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- čas přidán 28. 06. 2024
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I need a new laptop, but I heard that we have a microchip crisis. What happened? Has the situation improved now? And what are nations doing to prevent it from happening again? I looked into it and here is what I learned.
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00:00 Introduction
00:41 Microchips and Semiconductors
02:30 What caused the shortage?
10:46 The Consequences
14:11 What's Next?
17:37 Summary
18:05 Browse safely with NordVPN
#technology - Věda a technologie
We have microchips in Britain; we used to have them with microfiche.
Touché!
Please Granddad, what is a microfiche reader?
I remember using that, I feel so old
But most Brits wouldn't allow micromayo anywhere near the plate.
Thats not a dad joke, thats a great grandfather joke :p
Great summary. Was unaware of all the fires, and I find it rather suspicious that there were so many at critical plants in such a short period of time.
yeah, right? like, how long have all these factories been going? how many building-melting fires have there been? In buildings designed to keep human hairs and air borne particulate out of entire factory assemblies, but all are going to have a fire all at the same time?
@@crashdavis4123 Exactly.
Of which two of them only in Japan...
There is much money to be made from foreknowledge of such incidents.
Suspicious hurricanes.
Texan here: It wasn't that the electrical grid in Texas was badly prepared; it's that they intentionally kneecapped themselves by disconnecting from the national grid (which would have greatly softened the impact of such a storm) all so that they can increase their rates while cutting costs on things like backups and failsafes. They had the choice of following Federal regulations and stay on the national grid or go their own way so they can make more money: we all know which one they chose... And running off to Cancun; but that's a story for another day.
So it was badly prepared.
That's like calling sabotage a mistake. *Technically* it's a mistake to sabotage someone.
you can tell youre really a texan as your arguement makes zero sense. you clearly went to school in tejas, i bet you can throw a mean spiral though so at least theres that 🤷🏻♀️
@@byloyuripka9624 Tedgas
I remember seeing an article saying, "Texas is #42 in school spending an #40 in school performance for their kids" - and Texans thought this made their schools great! If that's great then I sure as hell don't want ANY Texans to MAKE AMERICA GREAT because it will END the USA as a superpower ... To me it just shows that Texas is a moron factory ...
Thanks. I'm in the industry, and this was a very useful refresher of everything that happened. It's not just chips we've had problems with, but also discrete semiconductors like Zener diodes, where the ones we needed for safety critical applications all seem to come from Onsemi. Current lead time 51 weeks.
Too true… and thank you for just calling them “chips”
I'm in automotive. 51 weeks seems like tomorrow. I'm still waiting on parts I ordered in 2021. I might get them before 2024.
Wow! I'm not in the industry, @epiendless1128 & @rbyt2010 & @Skipsul, so thank you for sharing the shocking eye-openers. Outside of the electronics industries, we really don't have a clue yet suffer the consequences.
So when will be the best time to buy me a new smartphone? ;)
I also worked in TV industry, back then a "shortage" would only be for the unique "concept chips", which could prevent production if not available, because it's produced by only one company without any equivalents available from other vendors. However, for all other chips, which are typically standard components, there are always alternate vendors who produce similar, or even pin to pin compatible, parts. This includes even some simple micro-controllers. So if one vendor fails, you can always rely on other sources. And that's a robust production principle, th design should work with parts from alternate supplies to prevent such unforeseen consequences. I really wonder what chips were in shortage for the car industry? I've never heard of concept-specific automobile ICs; all they use are standard, available, microcontroller parts with auto-specific sensors and actuators, mostly for engine-drive & cruise-control, and lately for multimedia-communications. So the shortage seemed somewhat "fabricated" to me...
If anything you are understating the complexity of the supply chain. It's not just the dies & wafers, but these dies and wafers then need to go through die-bonding (attaching to lead frames) then final encapsulation - and those added steps can take place in different countries from where the dies are made. So you could make a die in Taiwan, but die-bond in Malaysia, and final encapsulation in China. Or make the die in Austria (Infineon does this), die bond in Morocco, and final encapsulation in Malaysia. This supply chain complexity is *extremely* vulnerable. I own and run an electronics manufacturing company, and these last few years have been a wild ride.
We need to scale down consumption as the current model isn't sustainable.
Luckily phones can be built to last and to be repaired/refurbished.
This is written on my Fairphone 4 which is entirely adequate for a poweruser like me.
I can't wait until the day where the software will be designed with the user in mind, and not the people wanting to sell me stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like.
@@madshorn5826“which is entirely adequate for a poweruser like me“ oh boy the narcissism.
Who cares about what you want?
@@yvesaugustin912 He means he has high demands from his smartphone, and a mid-range device like Fairphone 4 is more than adequate even for his more demanding needs as someone who is an expert in advanced features; meaning, he's not some old boomer who just doesn't use advanced features on devices yet he doesn't need to keep changing devices.
@@RealPi that wasnt a real question from my side, he assumes that we all have to change behaviour, which we dont.
Virtue Signaling about his fairphone.
@@madshorn5826 Sure it's sustainable. We need to scale up, not down
"which is long enough for some of us to make an entire human being" Iove it! :)
You forgot to mention the recent extreme rise in GPU demand for LLM training. Server GPUs have been completely out of stock for months now and there is no relief in sight.
Yes, good point, should have mentioned this.
Now we can all stew together about youtube not allowing minor visible corrections of any sort in videos.
Crypto miners started a run on graphics chips around 2018 and 2019 after they began buying and using graphics cards en masse for their mining operations. Supply greatly suffered.
Another problem happened with forecasting. For instance, the auto industry, when the virus was seen coming, predicted a reduction of demand for cars of about 30%. In the meantime, the demand actually grew by 30% The semiconductor industry got the pessimistic forecasts from their users and only prepared to produce so many chips. These forecasts are made a year or more in advance.
A few corrections: What we call "the wafer" is not what is inside an IC package. A wafer is a large disc produced by the foundry, on which many chips are located (often thousands of them). After production, each chip is cut out, tested and packaged (which includes soldering the connections to the package pins). Also, a capacitor isn't a semiconductor, it's a passive, linear element. There are no wires to connect the elements on the chip itself; this is done by several metal layers or by using the substrate.
And did you say ASML was relatively unknown? That's the only vendor of the lithography systems used my most of the dominant chip producers. They've been #1 on the market for a long time; everyone knows them.
@@phenanrithe What she meant was they were specific to "industry", and not to end-consumer, even not to the car, TV, smart phone "design" companies. I've worked for TV industry and never wondered about the vendor of the "chip-printing" devices that the chip-producer companies (such as TSMC) were using. And mostly I thought they were inventing their own equipments... That's why chip production is hi-tech ? : -)
Though the wires in the chips are produced differently than discrete wires (material deposition and etching instead of mechanically drawing metal through a small hole) there is nothing wrong with calling them "wires"
I also got triggered by talking about microchips and showing printed circuit boards 1:17 . Never trust a physicist taking about topics outside their field.
@@phenanrithehmm, your use of 'everyone' is likely as inaccurate as her 'no one'
Some extra notes:
a) not only microchips had a shortage, but also many other electronic components (esp. capactors)
b) there were even some electronic components with factory lead times skyrocketing to 50 to 100 weeks...
c) it was not only the telecommunication companies, due to the shortage many other companies that normally work "just-in-time" (low own inventory, relying on framework contracts and low delivery times etc) were buying much more components than normally to improve their inventory buffer...
I'm surprised there have been so many fires in crucial chip factories... this sounds more than coincidental!
Certainly peculiar. Then again I was wondering if maybe there are always so many fired just that we never hear of them? I am totally missing a baseline for comparison.
Or we just say, that shit happens
I had the same thought. Either fires are common at microchip facilities and were only aware now because of the shortage or there’s something behind the scenes. One way to know is record every incident from now on or research the past.
Funnily enough I thought the same while watching the video. We can get conspiranoic and connect that to the Ukrainian invasion. Perhaps part of a plan. Or not. Who knows and who will ever know.
A fire during times of high demand is going to be more impactful, so you’re going to hear about it. Fabs are capital intensive and margins are critically linked to output. Setting fire to your own fab to boost demand when you could just stop starting new wafers would be complete insanity.
The biggest lesson we should learn from this is to remove unnecessary chips from products that never needed them. I don't need a computer in my toaster. Or my toothbrush. Or ....
Wait, you don't want a toothbrush that you need to hook up with your Wifi to update the firmware and upload your usage statistics to "the cloud" before that damn thing allows you to clean your teeth? Well, assuming it hasn't been infected with malware that is? I dunno man, sounds like a totally cool product to me, it has blinking RGB lights and a creepy AI voice reminding you which teeth you missed after all! /s
Agreed. Many products are becoming unnecessarily over complicated.
The best use of chips would be for robot servants who can then use and run all the unautomated tools and appliances for us! LOL
If those products didn't have those dumb chips, there would be less chip factories and so the shortage would've happened all the same. Those chips also tend to be much older technology nodes, meaning they aren't taking any capacity in factories making your computer or cellphone chip. Finally, not all chips are the same size or complexity. If a product uses a tiny chip that can be produced in a wafer of 10,000 other similar chips with 5x less manufacturing steps, the relative capacity required to produce it is low.
You say that but in many cases they have a chip because it's cheaper to have a chip. Your toaster has a chip in it because you can buy a 24Mhz 32 bit arm based micro controller for under 10 cents. You can't make a mechanism to pop your toast for that price. It wasn't just chips though that were missing, it was basic components too, bare transistors and things were going out of stock after being in stock since 1970.
Also, my tooth brush doesn't have a chip in it, it's a lump of boring plastic. Made in a factory full of chips.
And reuse make things last and stop going down the road of upgrading every 2 years
So, if you build a microchip production facility, understand that at some point it will burn to a microcrisp
Born and dragged up in the UK I liked your term Microcrisps, however as an expat I can confess Microcrisps..... Are what you get when some child decides to crunch the bag up and it explodes everywhere!
Best coverage of this issue I have seen to date.
I work for a wafer fab that primarily services analog chips to the automotive market, a few things that weren't mentioned in the video: during the early pandemic our entire facility was converted to producing primarily chips for medical devices, for over a year; the war in Ukraine also had a direct impact as Ukraine was one of if not the largest supplier of gasses used in semiconductor manufacturing (xenon prices for instance absolutely exploded to ~2mill$ a bottle). Now after the pandemic the consumer chip demand dropped by about 20%, but demand in automotive went up about 67%.
In addition to gases, Ukraine also exported tons of discretes and printed circuit boards - the war cutting down all this 😑
What is Xe used for in chip manufacturing?
Asianometry has covered this topic well, but I agree with the statement. We need to diversify material components of chips. While obviously I have my biases as a materials scientist, because I would love to see more funding for my field, it really would help if we are able to use materials that are readily available, easy to work with, and cheap. We can't be fully dependent on the likes of Si and GaAs. Looking into 2D materials is a big deal in my opinion. I'm a particularly big fan of graphene (of course), h-BN, MoS2, and TiS3.
Your field is critical, I hope that subsidies will come since the importance of it. Cheers!
Thanks, very interesting. I'm still to wrap my head around all this...
@@SabineHossenfelderI kinda hope you make a economic related video
It sounded like the world is hungry for more chips .. to the point of obsession ! Mama Mia. 😧
@@EffySalcedo I still think that programmed obsolescence is the main problem, not at all sustainable for environmental/economic reasons... Yeah the world is hungry for chips, I'd imagine that a lot of developing countries wants to avoid widening the gaps and dependence from the big ones, we just have to wait and see how we'll move forward...ciao!
Some corrections needed here:
- ASML is a dutch company, the main factory is in Veldhoven (NL), which is where the EUV machines are built, not Berlin.
- The description of the EUV lithography as a "new chemical reaction" is misleading: previous photolithography processes used the same type of reaction, with UV light of longer wavelength (e.g. 193nm), EUV uses 13nm wavelength, much shorter, and this is what allows much finer details to be "printed".
ASML has subsidiaries around the world who make specialized parts. And an important German supplier as well: ZEISS. I don't think it was this supplier, but probably one of the subsidiaries.
@@autohmae sure, but not the place where the EUV machines are built, as implied in the video (slightly less impact).
@@olbtube true, they are put together in Eindhoven I believe
@@autohmae Veldhoven, right next to Eindhoven.
@@martijnposthuma3121 ahh, close enough ! 🙂 (I'm certain people who life there don't agree, but on the grander scheme of things, it's close)
Sabine Hossenfeller is a must follow. Her insightful fact based explanations of complicated questions are fascinating. She is brilliant.
And if you want to know more about the chip industry: Asianometry is a great channel
This is why I still have a full box of punch cards for when card sorters are back in vogue.
Great overview of the semiconductor situation. I was aware of most of the problems you mentioned but the number of fires was a surprise. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The problem is not just financial.Chip production is highly specialized so there are always going to be a small number of player in each stage. Plus at each step in the manufacturing process needs a highly skilled workforce.
There is also the issue that a lot of these companies have invested a lot of money into the intellectual property that goes into the devices or manufactures them and that is where they really make their money and are not motivated to license it to people who will end up competing with them with their own development.
Too many fires to be a coincidence?
@@javahaxxorI thought the same thing. Seems suspicious that all these chip manufacturers factories burned down in a relatively short space of time. Either Mother Nature opposes chips, or somebody decided that the cost of chips were too low. On the other hand, aliens are trying to slow down humans space programs. After all, the U.S. has a number is wrecked and usable alien space craft, which are being reversed engineered. Lol😂
@@javahaxxor I was wondering the same thing . . . If a nation that wants to sow disruption in the rest of the world is willing to host and sponsor hackers and even poison dissidents abroad, why wouldn't they also host and sponsor arsonists who operate abroad?
@@Lucius_Chiaraviglio a nation, or a company... Who gains from all this? I know, it was Intel. From being kindof left behind, now they are at the key player in building up European chip manufacturing 😁
I'm being directly affected by this chip shortage right now (June, 2023). I am waiting on a function generator that is delayed due to a particular display driver chip that is in short supply.
We call them _microchips._ Europeans and Americans call them _microfries._
Aussie?
@@TheWorldTeacher British. 🇬🇧
@@nagualdesign Sorry to burst your Brexited bubble, but the Americans have invented not only the microchip but also the word.
That's because they're so often fried.
@@Eli-pj8xm Get your facts straight.
Why did the microchip walk halfway across the road?
It was semi-conducted.
Who writes these?
Doesn't work in English, something got lost in translation I think.
This was a riveting view of the semiconductor industry, thank you Sabine. In geology, we often have enough fear over shortages of safely mineable materials, so seeing the exponentiation of downstream factors really strengthens the need to communicate proactive solutions.
Redundancy of vital goods is important, and so is competition, so having more chip manufacturers all across the globe sounds like a great idea to me. Something something don't put all your eggs in one basket.
We are definitely seeing the many flaws of globalization. One country sneezes and the whole world catches a cold. But the people in charge like the control.
I knew about some of these factors as they occurred but not all of them, such as the series of fires in a string of chip manufacturers. Sabine does a fantastic job in research the facts and as she says without the gobbledegook. Thanks Sabine.
Long enough for some of us to make an entire human being. I love her sense of humor
That was excellently explained. Thank you: you are my new Stephan Jay Gould; my favorite knowledge imparter.
I was a bit worried this would fail to take in the big picture and the plethora of reasons that caused it, and only focus on the most well known reason. I am glad this was not the case, and she made an excellent coverage of this complex topic ❤
To be fair, UK also have chips, they just don't use it to mean fried thinly-sliced 'elongated' potatoes. Confusingly, Americans call their version of 'fish and chips' ... well, fish and chips.
Something quite similar happened (is still happening) with medicines. Even before Covid, many drugs were in short supply. Two medicines I use were both manufactured in a single factory -- the entire world supply coming from a single source in India or China.
AFAIK the primary reason for the shortages is that manufacturers decided that it would be more efficient (i.e., less expensive) to have only one source, located in a country with low wages, and to attempt to manage the supply to get it where it was needed exactly when it was needed. Of course, that tactic makes little or no provision for any unforeseen circumstance, like contaminants in a particular factory or (like microchips) fires or natural disasters. When those unforeseen (but inevitable) circumstances occur, the worldwide supply chain breaks down.
Does anyone else find it really weird that chip manufacturing was affected by so many fires? Why were there so many fires in this industry the past few years?
I wondered the same.
staff shortages and less monitoring /more sloppiness due to overwork. mix it with highly energetic chemicals like HF and boom.
Very fishy indeed. Probably CIA op.
@@dann5480 CIA be like: "let's cripple an extremely important industry on which almost every nation in the world, including the US- relies, in a country which is one of America's closest allies in Asia, for... funsies ig"
@@lukewatson8848 Not funsies Luke, for strategic reasons. How old are you?
At the same time the chips factories were having suspicious fires, several large food processing plants also had fire incidents. Driving the costs up and demand and reduced supplies, one such product impacted was baby formula.
Back to chips: The industries that employee engineers laid off people, I was one of them in 2022, but at the same time they were having us rework the technology to use different chips since they were hard to get a hold of... so I guess the poor people left had to do my job and others that were let go, plus their own work.
It starts off as dominos falling but quickly converts over to an avalanche.
Oh... I liked "Microcrisps" for your U.K. audience. LOL.
I thought the US baby formula production problems were caused by a bacteria in a factory of the largest manufacturer.
Sabine, yours is one of the few channels I see that make me feel I have understood the big picture. Fantastic work, thank you.
Love your punny wit! Great vid. Thanks for keeping us up to speed!
One point chip factories especially the newer ones using water also in a different way. They produce so called ultra pure water and then using this water as lenses(on top of the waver) to shorten the wavelength further. Yes the amount of water a chip factory needs is huge.
That is true for immersion lithography since 2003, but not for the newest EUV lithography. ASML is working on a "High-NA EUV" process but i would guess we see another liquid then water this time (i am not involved so an outside view guess). The amount of water needed for immersion lithography is nearly not noticeable and much lower then the ones needed for toilet, personal hygiene, cleaning or even the coffee machines.
TSMC Taiwan has 65k workers and they need the same amount of water as 600 US households that is really a very low amount. For example Teslas factory near Berlin is under attack for their water usage (100k gallons/h so 2.4M/per day and they already claiming to need more to raise the capacity)
@@Techmagus76 I'm less familiar with the specifics myself, but Asianometry did a video on the topic which I assume is correct:
Ultrapure Water for Semiconductor Manufacturing
I thought a factor was the car industry betting on lower sales during the pandemic, so they put in fewer orders. But the economy recovered quicker than they expected? Basically they were hedging the market and thought they could save some money.
Great to hear that the microphone quality is good again!
Speaking as a 40-year Computer Engineer, this strikes me as a really excellent summary of the events of the Semiconductor slowdown /showdown. Well done!
I've never owned a car newer than a 1998 model and I've still got from A to B just fine. I've seen perfectly good cars get scrapped just because they are old. I've also always built my own PC and it's always been based on best bang-for-buck components, rather than the highest end stuff I could get. These machines have lasted me probably 7 or 8 years on average, and an intermittent graphics card upgrade to last year's mid-range value king from the 2nd hand market usually gives it a new lease of life. Societies in the first world are ridiculously consumerist and wasteful. We all get played by companies drip-feeding us new model after new model, often with some degree of planned obsolescence in them to make us buy the new one (or we're just sucked in by shiny things and peer pressure). We could have such a smaller environmental footprint, making things we sell once that last a life time and not going out to buy the latest and greatest when what we have is still perfectly serviceable, but first-world humans are just stupid cogs in a machine built to rape the earth and funnel the proceeds to the richest 1%, as if they needed any more.
I really, truly wish I could keep my computer for a long time. The problem is software keeps getting bloated while still offering the same functionality practically, especially with the increased use of Electron in modern applications. Additionally, as hardware gets less capable of running more modern software, I am pushed into using free and open-source software and receive really poor support from users and developers alike even though I never asked for it to be free and I just wanted something lighter weight.
So, the issue of people disposing older hardware incapable of running newer software isn't solely caused by mainstream hardware or software companies pushing new products, but by free software alternatives that push people off because of their refusal to monetise their work and hostility towards their user base.
You and I seem to have a similar mindset regarding computers. I like to use computer parts that were the hot ticket 6-12 months ago, because they'll be for sale second-hand. Those parts are still perfectly serviceable, but the previous owner wants the next big thing. Unfortunately, the chip shortage has also disrupted the second-hand market (similar to the used car market). My PC needed an upgrade a couple years ago, but I put that on hold because prices went crazy. Now my PC is so out-of-date, the whole thing needs to be replaced.
AFAIK new technology is used in cars to reduce pollution
@@hailynewma9122 yeah, that is one point that does support buying new, as well as safety, BUT what are the lifecycle emissions of producing a whole new vehicle, compared to using one that already exists? It really only makes sense if you can afford an EV or something ridiculously fuel efficient, and I can't - my current car was actually free, my dad noticed it sitting out the front of a house on his street gathering dust and never being used, he asked the owner if he was doing anything with it and it turned out to be the farm ute that the guy had used before moving to his current house. He didn't think it was worth much and couldn't be bothered selling it. I ended up getting it for the cost of transfer, getting a free fuel tank to replace the leaky one (which I did myself), and getting some free tyres from a friend who worked in a car yard. He only real expense I've had from it besides rego and fuel has been a new set of rims to fit the new tyres. I live cheaply on welfare most of the time, so this is the kind of thing that allows for that - and I have one rich friends and have seen all their toys and apart from being able to own my own house, I don't really feel like I'm missing out. We could all easy deal with much less if we stopped comparing and trying to keep up with the Joneses because we're insecure.
@@mathilda12789 sorry, but none of that makes any sense to me. I've always just pirated software, and if you need something for work, work pays for it. The open-source stuff I've used has been very good, and no one should expect enterprise-level support from open source projects.
On top of that, no one has really needed a new CPU for the last decade. Even running off good fashioned spining hard drives is still not that much slower than ssd if it's a dense drive, and now you can get SSDs that are at least big enough for your OS that are pretty cheap. Really only RAM increases and vid cards upgrades have been required, but when I say required, my whole point is no one needs to play the latest games with all settings and slider set to max - you can get 98% of the experience for 50% of the cost of you make more sensible choices and just stagger you purchasing by a year or so, so you let the early adopters pay the new ear premium and you also let them work out the bugs by the time it gets to you on the 2nd hand market. I don't know what kind of niche software you're running, but Electron is based on chromium and JS, so we're talking web apps, which are generally not very resource intensive. I think you would probably find a fairly old PC with a RAM increase and an m.2 drive would still run your stuff fine if you tried it.
Hi Sabine, soon the millionth subscriber limit is broken. Perhaps a celebration with a brand new music video? Not much effort, just a cover of Bryan Ferry's "More than this".😊❤
I do enjoy Sabine"s music videos. That is a good suggestion for a song.
+1!
@@swat7s czcams.com/video/jZDVyNGEa18/video.html she talks about the song in this lecture, it's about her new book. The german title of the book is "More than just atoms..". The book is partly a kind of answer on the questions, that are asked in the lyrics of the song.
Thank you for the excellent video! This is one of the few videos that distills down the complex system to information that people can understand.
Love u Sabine!!! Do not stop 🙏🙏🙏. 💕
The biggest missing point: military chips are higher priority than anything else, and also kept in secret. When a tightly scheduled semiconductor fab cannot tell if they can produce your processor next month or not, that is fishy...
Thanks. Good summary. We were in Austin, TX during Uri, and without power for 4 days. Water is the big Texas issue for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. What about a future episode on water purification science?
That's an interesting suggestion, I will keep this in mind!
@@SabineHossenfelder The Asianometry CZcams channel has two excellent videos about water and semiconductors. czcams.com/video/Dq04GpzRZ0g/video.html and czcams.com/video/C3RzODSR3gk/video.html
A very thorough analysis. Thanks for the research and presentation Sabina.
This is a GREAT JOB, Sabina.
I'm looking at this as a software engineer with occupational training in electrical engineering.
While reducing the centralization and increasing capacity of the semiconductor industry are definitely good ideas, I think we also need to look at the factors that increase chip demand and cause it to experience market volatility.
* The quality of software engineering over the last 30 years has been deteriorating. This has caused processor manufacturers to have to focus on things like increasing chip performance even more than they would have previously. In chain, this has caused a de-prioritization of reducing per-unit cost of chips.
* Cars are one of the worst offenders, but they're not the only contributor of industry siloing. Aerospace semiconductors are also severe contributors to the need for specialized chips. If we can encourage companies to use more cheap off-the-shelf parts instead of parts that are industry, or even customer, specific; we can eliminate a lot of product diversity. This would allow for a more fault tolerant market. On top of that, it would allow for easier replacement of parts, which would reduce e-waste and reduce demand for replacement parts (Since replacement assembled product demand would be lower).
* Many datacenter, consumer, and corporate computers are made with an intended operational lifespan of 3 to 5 years. If we can institute operational reliability requirements for manufacturers that will increase that to 5 to 8, that'll reduce the demand for replacement products.
We're never going to reverse planned obsolescence. We could make the same argument about extending the operational lifespan of car parts.
"The quality of software engineering over the last 30 years has been deteriorating."
Oh just shut your yap. Practices such as Unit Testing and automated code analysis have dramatically improved the quality of software being released today.
How often does Linux or Windows (or apps upon) crash these days compared to the 90s?
And I'm also gonna call BS on "occupational training in electrical engineering." -- I was in EE for a spell and the two disciplines are extremely divergent. You are neither.
Those fires sure look suspicious when taken in bulk
its almost like Cooperate espionage but who benefits ?? shorting stocks?
illuminati did it
No.
COVID-19 had less people going to work. Which means less staff in every department, including safety departments.
Some of the processes that go into the creation of microchips are volatile, and we can see what it's like when the production of such is understaffed:
Fire!
@@SxyRikkuIf you know that chips are going to skyrocket in price, you hold onto it.
A fire can be used as an excuse to sell much less chips than the actual effect of the fire itself.
@@TheTattorack That is very interesting!
Great video once again Sabine!
French fries are french--note the lowercase. They are "frenched and fried" potatoes. Frenched being a cutting technique--cutting something into small strips. So you take a potato, cut it up into small strips and fry it. Frenched and Fried Potatoes, becomes French Fries.
Okay, what's with all the fires?
You can instruct any topic! Thanks for helping me understand the chip shortage.
Ha, I was trying to figure out whether it's a good time to buy a new laptop...
@@SabineHossenfelder Ha, thank you for sharing your knowledge and knowledge resources with us !!!
@@SabineHossenfelder I always wait for "the next great thing" in computing. It never comes.
@@SabineHossenfelderand is it?
@@UncleKennysPlace true. ive been waiting since 1946.
Texas : strangely the next county near Texas had worse conditions but had better planning. Including pipes buried below the frost line.
Houston here! Thanks Sabine. I had no idea our 2021 freeze effected the chip shortage so much. I do like the satellite image of Houston with much of the lights out during the freeze. To address the chip shortage, I’ve stubbornly held on to my older radios including my ham radio gear, many using vacuum tubes, although I am replacing old capacitors in those radios that are beyond their expiration date like the ones in the transmitter I built in the mid 1970s.
TechTangents did a video on Reforming Capacitors, so maybe replacing isn't even needed.
@@autohmae, these electrolytic and paper capacitors in my “All American Five” are over 70 years old so I will be replacing them. The ones in my homebrew transmitter are showing visible signs of electrolyte leakage so I will be replacing those too.
And then the Sun decides to have another Carrington event and the solar storm does bad things to all these microchips…..
It'd be nice if you did an in-depth physics video on microchips/transistors, explaining the QM behind the band-gaps and electron jumping - all the things.
Thanks Sabine for another great video!
This is amazing, very thorough research and explanation!
BTW, the picture you indicated was a "wafer" in the second minute of this video is not a wafer, but rather a processor chip - along with a few other passive components. This contains one "chip" from a wafer. A wafer contains many chips.
I love your subdued, blink-and-you'll-miss-it humor. Very informative video! Thanks for another great one
The interesting development lately, Sabine, is that new companies are starting to make compatible chips for those in shortage.
In the FPV market, for example, we use some microcontrollers which are pretty expensive right now... And now there's an alternative, which seems to work even better. But we shall see, because they're not fully integrated in firmwares we use, like Betaflight, iNav and ArduPilot.
Anyway, thanks a bunch for the video!!! 😊
Stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Danke Sabine, sehr nützlich, sehr aufschlussreich!
Microcrisp - Excellent, Sabine. Superb delivery.
Mathematically, what are the odds so many different factors would align like that?
A remarkable number of fires.
There was also major supply issues with package substrates. They didn’t have enough capacity in specific package types. We need to stop putting chips in fridges and washers. Those products are too complex now for their manufacturers, leading to poor reliability. All my appliances are 20+ yrs old and going strong. New appliances fail after only a few yrs. You see chip supply coming back though. PS5’s are in stock. I just taped out a 6nm telecom device yesterday. I’m taking time off now and rebooting my brain. But no supply issues for me.
No. We just learned it is very handy if there is a hidden diagnostics program included in old washing machines or heat pump dryers. Our about 10 years old heatpump dryer stopped to work a few month ago and with the built in diagnostics program and some help from the internet we could fix it without any cost at all. We, technical laymen will never have to call a mechanic again and save lots of money when we can fix problems on our own and don't need to scrap our devices before they don't really need expensive repairs.
Wow, you did a lot of research, thank you.
There will always be tension between robustness (localized production and independence) and efficiency (minimize warehousing, just-in-time production). Over the years we will most likely optimize again to a point where we will be vulnerable to a new cascade of unfortunate events.
A major issue for automotive chip shortage is that they generally use "trailing edge" (old) technology, for which the profits are lower and so those fabs have largely been phased out. Chip mfgs didn't have the option to ramp up production to higher levels and catch up, because the fab capacity simply isn't there any more.
GaAs fab engineer here. The issue with automotive isn’t fab capacity. It’s that they never accept anything new. They’re paranoid beyond reason about anything and everything different, and these sort of unreasonable quality standards are screwing them out of inventory, because nobody wants to build garbage, old, low margin parts for them anymore.
@@Grak70 well, pretty certain the cars needs to be re-certified in all aspects if they replace some chip (and the software needs to be ported over, possibly a different ISA).
Pretty certain no fab was phased out, it's mostly that the demand is higher now than in the past and nobody is building new factories for creating chips based on older processes. It's not economical, chips based on older processes used to just be factories that we not needed anymore for the bleeding edge because a new process is invented.
@@autohmae I didn’t say it was easy. Automotive customers just push everything to their suppliers. At some point, some of these old fabs making controllers and sensors are going to go offline and they will be forced to switch. And it will be extremely hard for them to do so. They need to do some planning now, not when it’s a crisis.
@@Grak70 yeah, that's probably also true, they possibly need to be prepared. That said, their are many fabs still producing chips with much older processes too.
Demand is still higher than supply, doesn't matter if it's DSP's, Linear regulators or capacitors.
Everyone are still trying to build stocks. We have nearly 2 years worth in inventory
It's like demand and supply doesn't work
Great reporting 👏
In all seriousness. I saw this coming 30 years ago. It is a function of just in time inventory practices. Voila Amazon. Keeping items in stock is capital intensive. It is far better from an accountants perspective to sell products you never even take possession of. It is a calculation that doesn’t fully take into account opportunity costs but nonetheless that is what is taught is business school. Control costs and capital expenditures, maximize profits. Happy customers don’t dole out bonuses to management, the board does. FWIW I don’t think corporations learned a damn thing from covid either, because they saw record profits and record stock prices. The unwashed masses pay for the inflation not not the upper echelons of society.
The one challenge that IC designers have is that a design is tightly coupled to the process node at the foundry it is being manufactured at. So very difficult to move from Global Foundries to TSMC and then to intel. The likes of Apple can afford to have multiple vendors but most don't. Which means a lot of companies are vulnerable to fires, typhoons and earthquakes inTaiwan, South Korea and Japan.
Also Intel failed to deliver on their plans to have chips based on newer production processes.
Thank you for the video.
I didn't realise that silicon chip factories went on fire so often. Discotheques or failing businesses yes.
The chips that come out of these factories are known as "hot chips".
At 1:17 Sabine is talking about silicon wafers and on-chip interconnections, but the video is showing a PCB, which is a completely different thing, and made of very different materials.
Anyone else think that in the future these chip plants might want to invest in better fire suppression systems?
Better security too I would say.
@@markoulton3342If you ever worked in Samsung or tsmc foundry, you'd know how tough the security is.
I expect similar shortages and supply chain issues but next time it hits we will all be talking about their affect on GPUs (or, more like, the shortages will be caused by the exuberant development of GPUs). That is if the current AI frenzy continues. You cant train AI models without some incredibly advanced, cutting edge GPUs. As such it is a field that has long moved past workstation scientists, gamers, crypto miners, etc.
Great video! Really informative and well put, as always, Sabine!
With all the mysterious fires in the USA and now the only factory that makes the machines that print the chips. Yea you can see what is happening. Prices ⤴️ the poorest lose. Crime⤴️ to pay for new products.
Great analysis thanks SH
The supply of older chips has been really hit, the bigger node size stuff I use in power control and lights so I've still got projects open from 2021.
best explanation iv'e had in years.
let's just hope the fries act includes strict fire prevention regulations.
Good summation of what happened. What you may not be aware of is that there are 5 new chip fabs being built in the US: 2 x 5nm plants, 2 x 7nm plants and a plant specific to the types of chips used by car manufacturers. That last one should be online by the end of 2023, and the others will come online in 2024. They broke ground on these plants in 2021. So, the US will be in good shape anyway. :-)
Thanks for that info, hadn't followed this!
I am not so sure this will help. Just like US PCB manufacturing in the 1990, it is my guess is that 10 years from now, each machine will be carefully numbered shipped and resembled in a country with cheaper labor. Historically injecting money like this has never seems to provided any value, but multinational companies are more than happy to take free tax payer money.
This sounds encouraging, but building microchips requires a very high level of expertise which currently does not exist in the US. Without the right mix is people, these plants cannot succeed. So where are the personnel needed for your plants coming from? Cheers.
@@dscott1524 Are you kidding? The US invented the stuff. Where do you think the Taiwanese got the tech from? The chip designs are done in the US, and the equipment that does the extreme ultraviolet lithography needed to create the actual wafers is made in the US (and the Netherlands). The US just gave up building big chip factories 30 years ago because labor was so much cheaper in Taiwan and China. Without US/Dutch supplied tech, neither China nor Taiwan can build chips smaller than 30nm or so. Really not a problem for the US. Though the Chinese claim they have build EUVL machines, it remains to be seen if they're any good.
Probably the best video I have seen on this topic
Greatly appreciate your content
1950s microchip or micron 1=10^-6 of meter in size. We had thousands companies without minimum scientific R&D. Today Nano 1=10^-9 of meter. we have only one equipment manufacturer and 10 chips manufacturer because it requires minimum 20 scientific institutes on R&D. Globalization which caused chip shortage globally is not just trade but also global collaboration at near "God" level technology development, fire at one factory causes global shortage at assembly line. Technological singularity is coming, today we have 7 nm chips and Angstrom 1=10^-10 of meter is 1 atom integrated circuit you can not squeeze more than one atom.
First crypto, they covid and now LLMs, GPU prices are never going to be reasonable again.
Another factor causing chip squeezes was when car manufacturers cut strongly back on production with people spending much more time at home. Hence they did not buy the chips needed for the electronics, leading to manufacturers of these retooling to newer processes. When the car manufacturers started buying the old chips again, the production capacity for the very old processes was no longer there, hence bad shortage. And switching to newer production processes with different chips was not just easy to do.
And then at the end of 2020 leaderhip waking back up realizing didn't use their budget suddenly began restarting projects.
Amazing summary, I had no idea about the background and the complexity of issues that have driven the chip shortage. Lots of fires though…
This video is fire!
I think reducing demand is a good idea - as long as the semiconductor companies have enough business to stay viable. As someone else noted, we managed to make do with heaters and cooking appliances vacuum cleaners etc. without computers and fancy nice-to-have tack-on features (many of which add to product unreliability anyway - more things to go wrong). Unfortunately, electric cars require computational hardware as do TVs, computers and modren communications infrastructure. Diversifying manufacturing bases has to be good.
Beautiful prose. "Enough time for some of us to make a whole human being". You weave your words as if you were a Sister Grimm. I must hear you in Germán. Then one day I will show up to one of your classes. ¿Which Grimm's tale do you like most? Marriankind reminds me of your style.
The reduction in purchasing may have been a good thing.
I find it odd there wasn't mention of all the shipping issues due to Covid as well. Even if we HAD parts, getting them to where they needed to go was a huge headache as well.
probably not
Sounds like a large scale war would be impossible to conduct without these chips too, so that’s a plus.
That is certainly a plus. However there is one north american country in particular that has been heavily investing for decades into endless mountains of military equipment - to the point of starving out their federal budgets to the point of utterly neglecting a crumbling domestic infrastructure and empoverishing large chunks of their population - that they can rain hell on earth many many timer over before they run out of equipment, even without receiving any new chips. On another plus side, I'm certain governments like China's knows this and know what would happen to the world market if they say fuck too much with Taiwan, so that at least there is some odd kind of reassurance that this whole invasion scenario seems like such a terrible idea, that they'd need to be insane to try.
@@Hugh_I I don’t think there are enough smart missiles and bombs though, I remember reading that we were having trouble supplying Ukraine because we were running into our own stash and we were (of course) short on chips. Makes you wonder how poorly even the military thought ahead.
This is actually a problem for Russia (who is under economic sanctions), they can't build smart bombs because of it.
7:10 TSMC alone uses about 156,000 METRIC TONS of water a day - about 41 million gallons a day.
The incentives from USA and EU is fantastic news! While, pre-pandemic market had only 5 companies from Asia that supplies all the semiconductors, now we could potentially have a few more from EU and USA. More supply with same level of demand = lower price. Which is excellent for consumers.
No, Raspberry PI 4 are still hardly available.
Really?
@@mariemccann5895 Yeah, especially 4 GB and 8 GB RAM versions.
You lost me at “ the EU has learnt it’s lesson…” Sabrina. You jumped the shark, there!😂
"Sabrina" LOVE her Boys (Summertime Love) check it out
_Sabrina_ is a teen-aged witch. _Sabine_ is a physicist with a YT channel.
@@UncleKennysPlace yeah, she changed her name when she grew up, Kenny. Nice haircut btw
Wow, "a series of unfortunate events" turned out to be quite the apt description, given all the fires involved.
This video was the first I've heard about a chip shortage. I guess I can make do with my TRS-80 for another year.