Where The Real Chip Shortage Is 

I retired in 2015 after 42 years in Wafer fab manufacturing, I recall this statement by an economist (I think) about this industry, “I’ve never seen so many smart people working so hard, for so little”. I couldn’t agree more! It’s a damn cutthroat business, you’re always on call, no private life and the reward are “ok lah”. I was employed in a European, later American owned wafer fab but I heard even more horrific stories from the Asian owned one.

The semiconductor industry experienced a demand fluctuation and spike that was outside of their operating tolerances, should have installed a nice demand capacitor tied to ground, the problem is the whole legacy system acts like one big inductor.

Some wafer technology doesn’t scale to larger wafers very well. Particularly non-silicon wafers that can only be produced in 150mm and 200mm sizes before inherent wafer defects create significant yield problems. 300mm equipment may double output, but it is often 5x+ regarding capital expenditure and maintenance cost.

One note. It's basically impossible to upgrade a 200mm fab to a 300mm one. Every single piece of machinery in there is designed for the specific wafer size so you'd have to replace everything. The only "Advantage" would be you wouldn't have to build a new building but honestly the empty building is the easy/cheap part. It would probably cost way more to take out all the 200mm tools than it would be to just build a new building next door for 300mm tools.

Respectfully, shutting down a 200mm fab to retool and upgrade to 300mm would be a grave mistake relative to building a new 300 mm clean room on the same fab site. Building a new fab would nearly always be economically advantageous especially if the 200mm fab is at max utilization

Voltage regulators are also tough to buy. As an EE, I won’t cut a PCB design loose until reels of parts are sitting on my desk, and then I over-order which doesn’t help the shortages. I’m buying parts for life of product, knowing many of those parts will be eventually excessed.

There has been a refusal by many companies to migrate 0.25, 0.18, 0.13um parts to advanced nodes on 300mm wafers. They have been focused on reducing costs by fractions of cents per part and driving ASPs down. They are not used to scaling. Almost impossible to get their designers to move to a new technology.

The leading/bleeding edge may be sexy, but so many industries run on jelly bean parts that you just can't get -- analog parts, mixed signal, power supply/regulators, and so many more. Quoting me an 18 month lead time on some of those jelly bean parts? Kiss of death!

as usual, another timely, informative and well produced video. thank you for all the work, and sharing.

I worked in the industry about 25 years ago. While much has changed since then, some things have not. As you stated there are basically 2 manufacturing processes, memory and logic. Within each process, they are optimized for the highest yield. This means designs are "tweaked" to work to a specific process and the process may be "tweaked" to a specific type of chip. A fab making DRAM may NOT quickly be able to switch over and make NAND memory. Worse, combining memory and logic will never be "optimal". Today's CPU chips have large amounts of cache memory. SOC (system on a chip) have an even worse combination; logic, memory, both cache and system SRAM, and NAND flash. Many have analog portion for AtoD or DtoA. Automotive chips do not want to drop below a 5 Vref so now you have multiple voltages.

Great point. And the tiny resistors, capacitors, diodes, etc that go into the boards are also in short supply with backlogs of >12+ months.

My VLSI professor told us 3-4 years ago this is going to hallen. His reasoning was basically that it takes a very long time to build a fab until it is fully operational so companies need to predict demand 10-20 years ahead. Of course they factored in growth but they have either underestimated that growth or they were too risk averse (building a fab you won‘t actually use fully is a very bad idea if you want to continue to exist). And roughly 5-10 years ago you were already able to tell that the new capacity never quite fully matches the increased demand. He reckons it is going to take a decade to fix this supply issue fully, so I am sorry fellow EEs, you will likely have to do logistics for a looong time to come. (he doesn‘t actually hold a professorship at my university and always tells me I shouldn‘t call him that but it is just easier to understand that way)

Great video! I like the details, where a lot of other videos on the topic offer vague assertions without backing them up. I also loved the Arizona water joke. Seriously, I am amazed the problem isn't brought up more often, with the worsening draught and all.

Analog and mixed signal designs can be moved to more advanced nodes, but their design techniques need to change. This means they need to hire different designers who have such experience. Also there is benefit of including additional capabilities in the chips.

Only a site like this would provide the 'missing information link' about what is actually going on in the industry and what is causing what to go forward or not going forward .. Bravo ! for such unique knowledge and smooth delivery that are so lacking in this world, when everyone is good at making noises, but so very few that can actually make sense ..

For chips that work with high voltages (20 volts being "high"), they need larger nodes so that there is enough insulation.

I don't know why it had never occurred to me that there is a brisk market for 25+ year old semiconductor device fabrication equipment, and that they are continuing on in revenue service cranking out in-demand chips. So there is no ongoing production of new equipment for old nodes? What is the oldest node (and largest feature size) still being used to make chips?

Good video as usual. Some thing you don't mention, though, is how inflation will affect the "inflection point" where a cutting edge plant can now price down it's product. In essence, that plant was built with usually debt, and that debt is not inflation indexed. So when prices rise, the relative cost of that debt is lower. If the profits necessary in nominal terms to recover the sunk cost of a 8 nm plant was $1BN, and due to inflation, the chips now sells for twice as much, that plant needs to put into the market about half the chips (not exactly half, because you still have some variable costs of labor, changes to taxes - going the other was as governments move to subsidze chips) for that sunk cost to be recovered and the technology to become "mature", or, as you say, comoditized. There is a lot of complexity to that, as inflation isn't universal in the global economy. Some currencies are losing more purchaseing power than others. And large share of chips are sold across borders. But rather than looking back to building the old mature tech, what you are just as likely to see are faster-than-anticipated decline in price premium for the more advvanced chips. This is good for consumers, and, depending on how each industry adapts - e.g., most automotive being much slower and less skilled at adapting to rapid change than, say, mobile handset makers or (allegedly) Tesla -- you may see divergence and market valuations of companies will diverge even more by sector. If, for example, a previously dismissed as mature industry may be able to step up to more rapidly commoditization chip architecture than some of those already pushing the envelope, and they should get a competitive edge and should see a boost to their valuation.

In Japan a 28nm fab is being built by TSMC. I'd call that legacy. Plus, once TSMC has a lot more production on N3, N4, N5, it will rebrand what it calls trailing edge, so there will be more availability of nodes like 12 - 7nm. Now, for some electronics you can't drop down too much because the IC would end up being so small that it's too hard to cut the wafer for the hundreds of die that would come from it. So, simple circuits that still warrant an IC but only have a few hundred transistors need to stay on those older nodes.

This is absolutely incredible. These are some of the best and most informative bits of content anywhere.

We started pulling components off recycled PSUs in our workshop and have started selling on eBay to get low volume amounts of used product to people who need them :S

Always good research and reporting on this channel

An amazing analysis, as always. Thanks!!! So many good ebservations in the comments, too. The video was looking at the main source of the current problems, however, it's also worth mentioning that chip designs are tuned to a specific implementation of technology at a certain node, so production can not be easily shifted to another fab line, even at the same node. The more advanced the technology node, the more this is the case. This creates inflexibility, so even when there is wafer capacity available somewhere else, it's no help in expanding production of a specific chip. Older lines often produce many different chips, so production scheduling becomes a delicate balancing act, trying to satisfy ongoing demand without gaps in the supply and to minimize the frequency of retooling. In addition, while the main issue is silicon, there are material and capacity shortages in a lot of areas, affecting current semi production. At the moment, lead times are crazy and often previously confirmed orders are getting partially or fully "deallocated", just before delivery. Then of course, greed kicks in. The worst I come across was a supplier trying to charge 210(!) times the price of the normal supply price of a chip. Counterfeiting is also rife, with buyers forced to do extreme measures like x-raying chips before accepting them. Leadtimes? I've seen 99 weeks. Increasingly, manufacturers just throw their hands up and simply EOL part of their product line, causing mayhem for equipment builders. Some companies producing and selling hardware with thin margains can often make more money reselling the surplus parts they actually have (maybe becuase of over-ordering, maybe because of missing a crucial part to complete the BoM) than what they make from building new gear which may be at negative margains, due to high component prices. Of course, selling surplus stock is just a sugar hit and the reduced production may kill their business in the long run. ...but I'm sure you've all heard similar stories! ☹

Thank you for explaining this rather complex subject so well. Even I could understand most of it!

It is not only microcontrollers. A lot of other analog and mixed signal chips too. ADC, DACS, motor drivers, voltage regulators/references e.t.c. Usually they are in stock at speculative resellers (for abysmal prices), but not in a normal one's like Digikey or Mouser.

These older node chips aren't just in consumer devices. They're critical in industrial manufacturing components which can't be easily swapped out or upgraded. It's weird how gas can triple in price in a couple months, but these components can be sold out for years in advance and up until they ran out of them they were selling at the same price as always. If the PS5 is still out of stock for the foreseeable future, maybe $500 just isn't a reasonable price to stick to. If Atmel and the like would double or triple the prices, we could at least be making sure they're getting to places they're really needed while also allowing them to expand capacity profitably. I don't understand why technology prices all seem so immovable.

I wish i had a sliver of knowledge of the info of your videos!!! I do enjoy them and appreciate the work, explanation and work you have to do to get to my level of understanding! Blows mt mind! THANKS for all your work and ROCK ON!!!

Always interesting and professional reports shown here on this channel !

The number of designs i had to convert from one MCU to another (and various other parts) boggles the mind often the same design many times for any quantity of roughly equivalent processors we can get

I thought you were gonna explain why I couldn't find any yellow tortilla chips at the store today. That's the real problem nobody is talking about!

Excellent video, very informative for your subscribers!

This installment was uncommonly interesting and useful to me. Many thanks!!

Many thanks for this information!

There are a *lot* more than 200 fabs in the world. I visited one in the smallish town where I live, and it isn't even the only one there. Most fabs make very low density discrete semiconductors, eg transistors, particularly power transistors (big & simple but also highly precises). Op-amps and 555 timers would also fall into this category.

Your channel is brilliant. Thank you for posting.

The new fab Globalfoundries is building in Singapore is also a trailing edge 300mm wafer fab.

Great topic but I feel you missed out another big factor that is influencing the industry at the moment. We are a small electronic production company that build some products that ship worldwide. So we see these issues on day to day basis. At this moment brokers are making millions by buying in large amounts of chips. Even new batches that come right from the production floor. Just to sell it at 4-10 times the normal price. They buying all stock world wide to create a shortage too so they can sell at a high price. For example we got a notice of chip back in stock from a manufacturer. Batch of 10k chips. Direct rushed in to buy 100 chips to keep production going. But the full batch was already gone. ( within seconds ) A few days later a batch of 9600 chips are showing up at a broker inventory for 8x the going rate of the manufacturer. Also almost all 3,3v regulators that are pretty common to use for all small logic. Are almost all gone in the world. But huge deposits are in the broker hands trying to sell them for 10-14 dollars a piece that cost normally around 1.5-2 dollars. Luckily a few chip manufacturers are now putting in the 100 chips per company rule. Meaning you can buy only 100 pieces for a set periode. With a batch size of 50k chips this gives a bit more breath room that there will be stock without brokers buying it all. As it seams that putting money into chips inventory might be the best investment at the moment as the interest and payout seems to be much higher then invest in housing market at the moment. Check a few chips at octopart . Com and see how many parts are only available trough brokers 😉

Essentially all STM32 parts are completely out of stock around the world. There are a few places with stocks of micros with factory price of ~$15, selling for $60-100 per part.

Brilliant channel I've learned a lot thanks. You'll gain a patron after xmas. Thanks for explaining the business layers of chip manufacturing. I have been caught out buying PICs. The chips that I prefer only need a K or so and they're over a year lead times. Thanks Deer 🙂 NEAL

What a great insight into this . Def earned a new sub

Tokyo electron is starting to make new tools of their previous generations etching tools due to customers demanding them. It's been over 10 years since a new one came off the line, but they're coming back

Moving to a larger wafer size is almost building a new fab with almost all equipment needing to be replaced. It is not as simple as you suggest.

11:52 did they really paint a Mondrian on the side of the factory? That's so cool.

Awesome channel, cheers from Brazil!!

I’ve been wondering about the supply chain of microcontrollers for a while - it doesn’t make sense that car parts would use cutting edge processors In my experience, embedded systems engineers have gotten used to overspecifying chips vs optimising code better - this can and should change

" TSMC Arizona plant. Note all the plentiful water" 🤣

I think I understood something you said at some point in this video but found it extremely fascinating!

1. An advantage to using trailing-edge technology is that it's easier to find substitutes. As you say, these are commodity parts with multiple suppliers, so you could perhaps find a software-compatible part with a different package or extra features. Compare that with finding a substitute for a bleeding-edge Nvidia GPU. 2. You may not need to construct new buildings to convert a fab from 200 mm to 300 mm wafers, but you do have to acquire all new equipment, as 300 mm wafers won't fit in 200 mm equipment. There are half-measures that can help, like re-optimizing the current processing procedures, jamming in more 200 mm equipment in places where it would help, and eliminating special-case processing steps as much as possible. These are some of the work-arounds used in the initial 200 mm to 300 mm transition in the 1990s.

The SAM is of course an inherited Atmel chip. Indeed all Atmel, Microchip, NXP, Nuvoton, STM low-end micros are sold out a year in advance and have been for a year and something, everything under $3, most things under $7 as well. And it's been a lot tougher to work around than shortages of higher end chips, which are still kinda available. Also special function analogue/linear semiconductors of particular kinds are hit hard. Chinese domestic chips have better availability. Maybe more 45-28nm utilisation? I do think maxing 28nm and node shrinking designs needs to be an intermediate goal, i feel, not adding another 90nm fab. But i think more 28nm fabs won't go to waste.

Glad I'm finally getting context to the chip shortage

Good video, very accurate analysis.

I want to thank you for an excellent summary of a much neglected topic. I retired last year from Microchip, working mostly on Reliability / Quality issues with mature EEPROMs for Auto and high Reliability customers. When you have to get long term performance out of non-Volatle memories even 250 or 180nm nodes can be touchy. Steve Sangi did a great job building up a 'trailing edge' business. Predicting the overall industry can be pretty difficult though. When I was at IBM Microelectronics I recall a senior engineer commenting (in 1991) that in ten years 2 or 3 Fabs would support all the chip needs of the workld's computers (ie, no phones, smart systems, etc...).

There is a fortune to be made for the person who sets up a proper e-recycling shop that focuses on chip reclamation with efficient acquisition, processing, and quality control. There is no shortage of e-waste and it's current use is messy at best.

Preface: I've worked 25 years for semi companies, Microchip the most recent (out of 40+ years designing products). This video, and all the other ones I've seen, "blame it on the fab capacity" It's not the fab capacity. It's packaging capacity. Testing capacity. Mask costs (especially 28nm and 22nm. At

My friend your channel is pure gold.

I am subbed and I don't always watch new videos, but every time I do it's very informative. Keep up the great work!

This reminds me of a project I have been working on every once in a while. It is an ASCII video converter and player, should really get back to working on that soon :D

A "better, faster" chip isn't always a good thing.

I think we need graphene copper boards and transistors . i dont know what introducing such an alloy would do to lithography but the lower resistance and higher overall conductivity will certainly help something. If not just power delivery and heat dissipation.

That's pretty curious. Looks like the market doesn't need that much the newer technology, but still needs LOTS of the old stuff. Really curious indeed.

I am glad that as a hobbyist I tend to buy components in much bigger bulk quantities than what I actually need. Some of the voltage regulators I bought back in 2019 are still being put into new hobby designs today since I can't find anything equivalent today! This is a great reminder to engineers (both hardware and software) that we should be focused on making our designs as modular as possible, so that you can easily swap out voltage regulators or even entire SoC's. PS: Wow, the ESP32 is far more powerful, much cheaper, and more available than the ATSAMD21G18A chip that you covered in the intro to this video. Then again, companies probably find it cheaper to spend exorbitant amounts on chips like this than to completely re-design the microcontrollers and firmware for their controller boards.

So short term speculation lead to short term decisions which impacted long term supply. Who would have thought of that?? This is what happens when single minded immediate profit companies thinking about the next quarter make rash unfounded decisions on short term speculation.

would be awesome if you could list the sources. I love when video do this, it adds on the credibility.

Great video as always

God just spent an afternoon redesigning a system to use an alternative to the ATSAMD21G18. This chip shortage is a gigantic pain in the ass.

Lets you know how fragile the economy really is, and how just one bad decision can totally wreck it in many ways. The Economy isn't something that can be managed, it's literally billions of people making billions of individual decisions every single day, you can not predict what is going to happen. It's next to impossible. Business assumed the economy would slow down dramatically, but consumers kept consuming.

Amazing analysis, thank you!

The picture you used in your thumbnail I used in a class project like 4 years ago in college 😂

Why did the US give up so much of it's fabs? I sorta remember when AMD did it. I think they claimed they would save money and could focus on chip design. Intel kept theirs till recently? I kinda agree with the people saying giving up so much manufacturing and industrial capabilities to make the rich richer and maybe tie everyone together so supposedly war is impossible was a mistake.

I wonder if this is where we see some kind of disruptive innovation. FABs, to me, are identical to integrated steel plants, which were disrupted over decades by minimills using a more efficient production model. I wonder if in a similar way, the lowest-grade silicon will see some new method, and slowly this method will move up the quality chain?

Oh thank god someone finally made this (excellent) video so I don’t have to keep explaining this to people! Now I can just give them this link!

Thanks for your video!

Well Renesas mcu are in very heavy short supply. They have caused lots of damage to Japan's car industry in the last 2 years. They may have single-handedly reduced Japan's car output by 500,000+ units over last 2 years. Renesas are very slow to invest even though they are making big profit. Earthquake and fires also don't help there Fabs.

Can you make a video if mainland China attacks Taiwan and the consequences for chip market

Even an in-place update of 200mm to 300mm would be a bit silly (assuming it's physically even possible to find space in the fab to install new machines). Many old tools simply weren't build to handle 300mm wafers, and even upgradable ones' manufacturers may no lover have the expertise (or even exist). In cases where upgrades/replacements are possible, the lead-time is likely horrendous, and fab companies would have to cull orders for their new/newer high end fabs so suppliers can work on making/upgrading equipment for the old, low margin fabs? Some wafer robot lead-times are approaching TWO YEARS now--go and figure out which of your fabs you want your next EFEM order to go to, and likely that's not for refurbishing ancient fabs. I think cases where that works out economically would be exceedingly rare.

For the people going "why retool not build new when the building is the cheap part" your technically correct, but lacking context. A building might only be a couple of million of a several hundred million dollar line, but the earthworks, foundations, and fitout of the shell itself make up roughly half the total time from design to commissioning, and the vast majority of the external requirements regarding permits and legislation. And thats assuming you have the space, power, water, workers, administrative capacity to not only run 2 lines, but run one line while the others being constructed, which can entail far greater disruption than "retooling" even when it means essentially complete replacement of the actual machines in situ.

Sony's old fabrication plants in Japan proved that (at least with entertainment videogame system processors) they could take the early 1999 finalized silicon engineering sample Emotion Engine CPU and Graphics Synthesizer graphics chipset from (I forget at the moment) whatever the manufacturing process node was in early 1999 or late 1998... because the prototype PlayStation 2 engineering sample motherboard was demonstrated by Ken Kutaragi in March 1999 at a special Sony industry presentation not really made for consumers iirc but was still reported by the videogame magazines of the time back when internet news was just not organized or reliable. Anyway Sony went from whatever that initial process node was in early March 1999 to the mass production process node for launch in March 2000 (because the Sony press release said the die shrink would allow for higher yields, lower wattage, lower thermals... stuff that was common before Microsoft Xbox changed that in 2001 and later Sony followed suit at great cost and risk to them) all the way to the 2006 Sony PlayStation 3 launch which featured iirc a 90nm die package of the EE and GS processors which used a heat spreader. However due to the difficulties of that time and customer fears and confusion as well as some bad marketing campaigns on both Pro and con sides... the PS2 chips were removed from the PS3 yet PS2 chip production continued and made some major improvements to 65nm production node by 2008 to 2009 which included the expensive RDRAM memory chips inside the die package and basically no need for a heat spreader and definitely much lower wattage consumption and thermals. So for nearly ten years of the PS2 CPU and graphics processor production, Sony definitely and evidently proceeded to provide historical evidence that processor die shrinks are indeed possible if a company wants to do them. Now the EE and GS processors were proprietary to Sony and as such they had more engineering control. With the PS3's CellBE CPU and the Nv47 based RSX GPU, both of which had to be reactionary produced at 90nm in 2006 as opposed to 65nm which for Cell CPU was Sony's original target node... both of those processors continued to be fabbed until die shrinks made possible around 2011 to 2012 to either 40nm or possibly maybe 28nm. Then all that changed and had to be dropped because Sony had been sustaining losses and Microsoft had called for next generation hardware around 2011 and we ended up with AMD becoming the designer of the CPU+GPU package and TSMC being the only fabrication plant to provide processors on a 28nm process node for 2013 mass production. I don't believe Sony has much control like they had when fabbed their processors at their proprietary fab plants so I can't recall what die shrink the PS4 Slim reached around 2020 to 2021 but this is just an example of what is and was possible. However TSMC pioneered and reached the cutting edge production nodes... YEARS AGO... bearing in mind the harsh reality of the year 2020 problems the least we could expect from other chip manufacturing plants is to have improved their processes. As pointed out in this video, a 90nm fabrication plant may be limited to 90nm production unless there was some way possible to replace and reformat the manufacturing tools inside the plant which sounds easy but is just insanely expensive in reality. Still Intel owns a vast array of fabrication plants... if they wanted to or if it was plausible, they could provide services to AMD and Nvidia for GPU fabrication nodes... however iirc Intel does not have the same technology as TSMC for that aspect because their main products are CPUs Outside of that, fabrication plants that reached 28nm should in theory be able to handle die shrinks for many processors to provide increased yields in theory... however there is a cost there and maybe some manufacturers don't see the point in paying for it if their mass production processors are already being fabbed at 130nm, 90nm, 150nm, etc. Therefore if Intel wanted to produce Itanium CPUs on 28nm and lower as an example or even have AMD make 28nm Phenom II Hexacore CPUs... all those things are possible but those are not things that their industry are about... thus other processors for industrial use and car electronics are a different industry but are still affected by the year 2020 problems.

chip shortage should be a lesson to engineers to make their designs cpu architecture agnostic. i started doing it with my designs as standard practice around 10 years ago. little did i know how it would pay off later.

Very well explained!

This is by far the best explanation I've ever seen

I got a bad feeling that this problem will most likely carry through 2024 or 2025....

Just like the demographics and climate problems, the pain hits long after the deed was done. Notice how a lot of this shortage is military industry related.

Excellent video!

Love your channel jfc, thank you.

great video. One thing I would take a bit of issue with is die shrinking old designs is not "always" a good thing. Less die size does mean cheaper and less on die parasitics, which means faster ICs. This should be a "win/win" as who doesn't like faster ICs? As it happens, the FCC may not. Sometimes a die shrink will make a processor too fast for it's own good, and where a design used to pass radiated emissions in a larger package, it will not in the smaller one.

I really hope all that extra capacity hits the market right when demand slows down. Would lead to very cheap hardware which could lead to new innovations.

Cheers for the insights bruv.

We have the exact problem right now. Parts that used to cost 6 Eur are out of stock for up to 92 Weeks. And broker offer them for 400-500 Eur right now. Its just insane.

The cost problems that the executives are talking about in those docs could be eliminated with a simple solution: eliminate the executives, and redirect their grossly inflated salaries into manufacturing.

my local coles doesn't have any lays chips i'm pretty sure that's the real chip shortage

What do you think about reusing chips from scrap? I am refferring to trailing-edge ones. Would it make sense? Is it already ongoing? If recycling does not make sense, why?

It would be interesting how the prize for a new fab at a given node size changes over time.

Manufacturer: Oh man, we really need to order some more of these chips. Chipmaker: We don't have any of those in stock. Manufacturer: But we need them for our products. Chipmaker: This chip is old tech, that's getting more expensive. Manufacturer: How much is it going to cost to make them? Chipmaker: Nah, you don't want to pay that much. Manufacturer: If the choice is between selling fewer products because we had to raise the price, or selling no products, we'll take the more expensive chips. Just make the damn chips and we'll buy them! Chipmaker: Ehhhhhhh we don't wanna make these old chips. It'd take a lot of work and we'd have to raise the price. How about we just don't sell you those chips, and we'll make less money? Manufacturer: _*#%& @^#% #$&)!_

We may live in the Sonoran desert her in Phoenix but... there's a reason the metro valley is reaching a population of 5mil. We know how to handle water. The new FAB plant is being built a couple miles north of the Central Arizona Project. The CAP is a canal that runs for over 150miles from the Colorado River by Parker AZ, down to Phoenix and then Tucson. It's primarily use is agricultural. Less than 15 miles to the north west of the FAB is Lake Pleasent. That's a reservoir of over 1 mil acre feet of water. No river runs freely in Arizona. We have multiple reservoirs in the mountains where we collect winter snow runoff to supply drinking water. Much like California, only we do it better without all the Democrat corruption and mismanagement. I've been here over 40 years, watch the Valley quadruple and we've never had to ration water. So... pretty sure the FAB will be just fine.

This vid aligned really well with a rumor of Samsung looking to buy NXP.

The fab capacity that was freed by the Automotive industry cancelling most their semiconductor pipeline was not re-tooled, but instead used for MEMS and mixed signal chips?

The real chip shortage is in my Doritos bag right now

sounds like PERFECT storm is brewing with Recession in the Horizon and NEW mature tech factories coming up....

thanks. very relevant video. Nothing sexy but it really hurts the rest of the industry with the shortages.

Thank you. Managed the Si validation labs for I,A and Natsemi. Best synopsis yet. I have now left the industry.