Since January of this year, I have been waiting for a certain MCU (STM32F042K6T6) to be available but still no luck. I get the bigger picture now: there's a shortage at the source. I have to move fast and secure a stock of the rest of the ICs, otherwise this supply-chain issue can be disastrous to small hardware companies.
I'm convinced that, if in-person IEEE meetups were still a thing right now, you could drop a tray of ST Micro chips in the middle of the meeting and watch it devolve into a fistfight in seconds.
+1 for having to be sealed.
We have a handful of companies wanting to sell us needed chips but they are odds and ends, not always packaged. Were always suspect.
