Quote:
Originally Posted by chassis
Thanks.
OK, a fire in Renesas Tokyo and a fire in AKM Nobeoka City. Two factories are crippling the global auto industry? C'mon. You all believe this? How many of you have experience in supply chains in your professional careers?
|
It's a contributing factor. Maybe you are new to semiconductors and electronics? The CapEx required for modern fabs is so high that this isn't like other industries where there are a lot of sources of something. Further, even if you are making something relatively mundane, it is customized to be produced on a specific process. If you move it, there is a lot of work to be done and high cost (new mask sets, etc.). It takes time... AKM's fab burned down in November 2020 and since this fab was specialized in producing mixed-signal ICs, they can't even move most of their designs to competitors. Their whole business depends on that fab and it's still going to take them over a year to get it back up and running. AKM doesn't sound important to automotive, but they did make some popular sensors to go along with audio chips. Don't underestimate the schedule impact of having to redesign a PCB because the audio codec that Toyota designed in is now unavailable.
I work in medical, and even we can see domino effects from the AKM fire. I have a design that used an AKM competitor's parts (Cirrus), and soon after the fire, a bunch of large AKM customers and speculators bought up the entire supply of the substitute part in the channel. We ended up having to switch to a TI part which required more extensive board and software changes.
Did you forget when flooding in Thailand crippled the worldwide supply of hard drives in 2011? Or when shortages of multilayer ceramic capacitors from Murata, TDK, etc. were causing delays a couple years ago? The electronics industry is built for production at massive scale because nothing else is profitable. There is little stockpiling of inventory and demand must be projected far in advance due to how time consuming and costly it is to add capacity.