I spent most of the day yesterday chasing down crosses for P-Channel FETs.
They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers).
I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps.
I don't even know where they all went. It's not like you need a TSMC slot to make a FET.
And whatever you look up, Chinese brokers have 10K-50K pieces of them for $25 each. Don't know what to think of that, either.
It's my current living nightmare. Endless treadmill of:
1. Our contract manufacturer calls in a panic no longer able to obtain/was shorted on a shipment of part XYZ. XYZ is increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts like MOSFETS, oscillators, to slightly-more-complicated but not "fancy" stuff like serial transceivers, USB stuff, NOR flash, load switches. TI is the bane of my existence currently.
2. Search for a drop-in or near drop-in replacement. There are none, because that's what everyone's doing.
3. Search for alternative designs. Maybe the component is in distributor's stock (Digikey, Mouser, Newark, etc), maybe it's not.
4. Test the alternative design. By the time I receive parts, prototype, test, guess what? Can't get those parts anymore. Go back to step #2.
5. Fall behind on all of my other NPD responsibilities. Stress, burnout, acceptance. Lament not going into another engineering field. Feel bad about my midwest metro area compensation in comparison to a bunch of Silicon Valley SWEs on website.
Your OODA loop is way too long. We buy ALL the parts immediately, within 10 minutes of finding something. If they don't work, it's a loss.
On new designs, I find a part in stock, we order ALL we need for the next year, and THEN I make a footprint and put it in the design. For EVERY SINGLE PART. Starting with the IC's. It actually works quite nicely once you get used to it. Obviously, there are some losses there too - just the cost of doing business in these crazy times.
Wish my slow corporate behemoth would support this, but they are the opposite of agile.
It's also gotten to the point where there doesn't exist enough stock in distribution to buy a year's worth. And I'm not talking high volume, maybe 1k/year to 50k/year. Distributors are constantly decommitting from orders, broker stock is drying up, etc
It is surprising how easily companies will fund this change in buying habits when the entire company's existence depends on it. The CEO needs to have a come-to-Jesus moment though.
We've spent several hundred thousand at "Win Source" broker in China, and haven't had a problem yet (knock on wood). We X-ray and test to verify though.
Mostly, Chinese brokers are a den of thieves/a pool of sharks. If they can counterfeit it, they do. Use a credit card to help with clawing your money back in case of fraud. And never ever buy IC's from Amazon or Ebay. Those are ALL fake.
The shortage of electronic components will continue for a long time, and a professional partner who only sells genuine products is particularly important.
Isn't this just contributing to the problem? I mean it's like toilet paper in the pandemic. But of course, if you're in business what choice to you have?
I can't even get cables anymore. Or connectors. It's an insane situation, and the company I work for isn't built to manage this level of churn in our products. How do you support customers when equipment BOMs change every week? We just can't keep up.
I'm involved with pneumatic connector manufacturing, and we had trouble for awhile getting raw aluminum at any price to make them. At one point we had to buy 3" aluminum bar and use our lathe to turn it down to the size we actually needed (mostly a mix of 2" and 2.5") causing a insane amount of aluminum and time to be wasted (yes the scrap is recycled, but its worth 1/10 of it in bar form). During this it was tempting to tell customers placing orders that if they want their parts faster than 3 months, they need to send us raw aluminum so we can actually make their order.
For some of the other "jelly bean" parts we need (o-rings, snap rings, etc) we are looking at making them in-house, but both the raw materials and machinery to make them are not possible to get. We could spend the next few months making our own machines to fabricate them, but without being able to source steel and various rubbers any more reliably than the finished goods, there isn't much point.
At this point, its tempting to try and raise capital to start mining and smelting aluminum, steel and buy an oil well and small refinery so we can ensure we have the materials needed to keep production smooth.
Companies used to do that before the leveraged-buyout / MBA / private-equity ridiculousness started. I think...Youngstown Tube Co had its own mines, called "captive mines" dedicated just to making metal for them. That's where captive insurance got its name.
It's not TSMC capacity that's the problem. It's the large nodes that make everything except cutting-edge processors. Nobody builds a new large-node fab, but demand for large node components keeps rising.
A big part of it is increased demand caused by the disruptions themself: a lot of companies are now stocking to have enough to run production for the whole year, while otherwise they'd order just-in-time. That causes further reduced availability, which causes more companies to stock up, repeat ad infinitum.
It's a good theory, but I don't know how to prove it. Of course that's one cause. I'm concerned there are also cascading material shortage problems that have clogged up the system and may be preventing deliveries. I suspect NXP lost their 2022 fab slot for Kinetis micros, but no one is talking. Just delivery dates of late 2023. How many others did that happen to? Why? I am concerned China might be flexing their muscles by shutting down Shenzhen, and maybe they have been flexing their muscles for a year now. I am concerned there is a tipping point that we are close to, where it ALL just falls apart.
I don't have insider information or anything, but I'm convinced that packaging is a huge part of the problem. There are many more wafer fabs than packaging houses, packaging hits high-volume low-margin parts much harder, and everyone routes through the same (lowest cost...) houses in the same tropical low-wage countries because packaging dice is basically a commodity service.
Except that now there isn't enough capacity to go around.
Demand for semiconductors only recently exploded. In 2016, annual growth suddenly tripled for a few years. It's hard to know if this rate of growth is sustainable, or if it will fall back to "normal" again soon.
Switched-mode power supplies (SMPS) are eating components at an alarming rate. The increase in high-efficiency DC and battery-powered products has really changed that market.
shouldn't these shortages lead to older equipment/processes being dusted off and brought back online?
7nm or whatever state-of-the art processes may be important for certain latest electronics, but I'm guessing there are many components that could use 10 year-old or more semiconductor fabrication processes.
A year? It seems like you should have been able to come up with something within a year? Unless it's an exotic or you have tight targets for cost or supplier qualification.
If you're willing to share the original part number, I'm curious as to what FET could cause so much grief.
I had your exact same problem a few weeks ago trying to get P-channel FETs and ended up with the SI2301CDS-T1-E3 which Mouser has just 143 left (which you can't believe).
Same with USB-UART bridges; zip, nada, nothing. I found some Cypress parts a few weeks ago, and I should consider myself lucky.
I won't order PCB until I have all reels of parts on my desk.
The LED is the component on the left; there's a very dim flash (pretty much just the black die turning red) at around 11s, then every few seconds.
I can't remember exactly how it works... I think there's two capacitors charged up to the voltage of the LED in parallel through high-value resistors, and a circuit that shorts the +ve of one to the +ve of the other to put them in parallel.
It only just works at a very specific light level. IIRC some of the transistors are used as very low leakage diodes rather than transistors, as the regular diodes I had we're too leaky.
Cool, it's a self powered light meter. The more light there's in the environment the more frequent the blink. Maybe can be adjusted to have less frequent, shorter lasting but more powerful flash!
Many electronics work that way. Motors can also generate electricity. Inductors can create or sense magnetic fields. Resistance is generally temperature dependent. Etc.
Well, pairing the TV with a light sensor in a fixed location, and like, having the tv alternate between a sequence of different patterns, and recording how this changes the reading of the light sensor, and assuming that the room is otherwise dark, uh, apparently can be used to produce an image of the room as if taken from the location of the tv and illuminated from the position of the light sensor?
Ok. Most TVs are equipped with an IR sensor, so with a slightly more capable one you could take an image from the pov of the TV, and illuminated from the TV. Yikes.
Speed of light is fast, even if possible you'd be looking at a lot of conversion losses. It'd be like trying to use a wire as a battery because power has to travel from one end to the other
I’ve heard of materials that can slow down the speed of light propagation. Imagine you can slow the speed of light to a crawl. You shine a huge amount of light into this material, which has a mirror on the other side. Before your light arrives back at the source, swap it for a mirror. You’ve now got a huge amount of light energy trapped.
Okay, I imagined it. Converting electricity into light is inefficient (maxing out around 44% [1] excluding ballast losses), and converting light into electricity is also inefficient (topping out at 47%[2] efficiency). So you'd end up with a battery that stores energy at extremely low efficiency (less than 21% combined), relying on a hypothetical exotic material that can slow light transmission to ~0.00000001c, assuming you don't mind using a hypothetical box that is 1km long, and you can shine the light and replace the light with a mirror in <1 second. And that's before even accounting for the fact that perfect mirrors do not exist, so you'd be losing another 0.1% of remaining energy with every cycle (i.e. every second)
Or you could buy a lithium-ion battery off the shelf today at 95% round trip efficiency and low self discharge.
Another piece to think about is density. Even with these losses.. how much energy can a material hold in terms of pure light? Is there a limit to how much light can pass through a material?
And I wonder if you could slow the light down even further, maybe 2 or 3 more orders of magnitude..
There are actually flow meters that make use of this. They heat the thermocouple using itself, then switch back to using it as a thermocouple and measure the rate of heat dissipation and correlate that to flow rate.
CPUs and GPUs account for more dollars spent than solar cells, but solar cells account for most area/mass of semiconductor devices made today.
A gigawatt of solar cells represents about 5 square kilometers of silicon wafers at 20% light conversion efficiency. The world installed 183 gigawatts of solar PV in 2021, almost all of it based on silicon wafers:
Until the early 2000s, demand for polysilicon (often simply referred to as “poly”) was dominated by the semiconductor industry, which required a fairly steady 20,000 to 25,000 metric tons (MT) per year. But semiconductor demand for poly was quickly outpaced by PV as the solar industry began to grow rapidly, from a rounding error at the turn of the millennium to almost half of global polysilicon demand by the middle of the decade.
...
By the end of 2013, the manufacturing cost of polysilicon had tumbled to below $20/kg among industry leaders. Meanwhile, capacity had grown from less than 50,000 MT per year in 2007 to over 350,000 MT per year by 2013.
Polysilicon capacity at the end of 2021 was in the neighborhood of 700,000 metric tons, with more big expansions on the way. The extra 350,000 metric tons added since 2013 is almost entirely for solar.
The MEMS sensor for an accelerometer is quite simple. Take the nearest comb and smack it against a desk: you'll notice that the comb vibrates in one direction. Now hook up two combs and interleave their teeth together so that they're barely touching. When they touch, an electrical signal is sent through them to sense when they touch.
Add differently sized teeth, the larger the spacing the more acceleration is needed before they activate. (EDIT: Looks like the iPhone MEMS uses capacitance... similar concept though, the capacitance changes based off of how far away these teeth are from each other and you can measure that using college-level electronics)
Finally, have these teeth rotated in all directions, so that you can sense all the directions in one little device.
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MEMS are about using the physical properties of object, but just making these small physical objects really, really, really tiny thanks to the magic of photolithography.
You can make any shape you want with modern chip-making tools. The "shape" most people want is a transistor (gate, drain, source). But in many ways, a teeny-tiny gear is simpler to think about.
The practical applications of micro-scale MEMS (gears, combs, springs, etc. etc. ) is somehow harder to think about than computers, so there aren't very many practical MEMS around. But still, practical MEMS help remind us that all of these chip-making tools exist in the real, physical world. Albeit at a very small scale.
Capacitive sensing is the norm for consumer accelerometers: you generally don't want surfaces making contact and especially sliding past each other in MEMS in practical applications because the surfaces will tend to stick to each other or wear extremely quickly (MEMS gears are a neat trick but you won't find them in any product using MEMS because they last a few minutes of operation at best).
- very tiny microphones for smartphones (speakers are harder)
- Digital Micromirror Devices (DMDs): arrays of tiny mirrors used in most projectors
- microfluidics ("lab-on-a-chip" stuff for fast disease testing, DNA sequencing, cell manipulation, etc)
And a couple other semiconductor applications:
- LCD/LED screens (monitors, phones, laptops, etc) (these are made on a glass surface instead of a silicon wafer but use the same basic manufacturing techniques)
- laser diodes (laser pointers, CD / Blu-ray players)
I used to be a professional computer geek on weekdays and professional photographer on weekends; and 20 years on, it still blows my mind the similarities between the materials and manufacturing of the CPU doing heavy work in my laptop and the sensor gathering pixels in my camera :O
E.g. EPROM (memory type chip) is typically deleted by shining a uv light on the actual silicon die, through a uv transparent quartz window in the final packaged chip.
That's not an EEPROM. That's an EPROM. The first E in EEPROM is ELECTRONIC - i.e. you use a voltage (or a control word) to indicate that you would like to erase the device.
Also, EPROMs are extremely vintage. They were replaced by EEPROMs - the first of which came out in 1977. That's an... extremely vintage example.
> Also, EPROMs are extremely vintage. They were replaced by EEPROMs - the first of which came out in 1977. That's an... extremely vintage example.
IIRC, EPROMs were still cheaper than EEPROMs for many years. EPROMs probably were sold in commercial quantities well into the 80s, and maybe used in the 90s.
EPROMs were erased by just throwing them into a UV-bin and blasting them with UV light. In contrast, EEPROMs needed transistors inside to handle the erasing cycle.
Finally, EPROM's last stand was as a low-cost one-time-programmable ROM (aka: PROM). All you had to do was make the same chip except without the expensive "window" (that'd normally receive UV-light for erasure).
Studying EE in the late nineties, I can remember coming across EPROM microcontrollers a few times, but definitely not in new projects.
IIRC, students recently graduated when I was doing my freshman year had used them for projects in their freshman year, but not since - so they were probably commonplace until 1990 or so. At least in Trondheim, Norway.
I just flashed (literally, shined UV light through the window) and reprogrammed a few EPROMs on a pair of HP 83623a signal generators yesterday to facilitate moving a module from one, where we didn't need it, to another, where we did.
Industrial equipment moves at a different pace, and in these days of 10x price jumps and "52 week" lead times, sometimes dusty relics from the 80s wind up being relevant in 2022!
I had professors who were active during the time and gave me the rundown. I have touched EPROMs and all that good stuff, still part of the labs at my college and my professor liked talking about "the good ol days". But I've never in fact used them in any practical manner.
This might just be your perspective. No idea your age, but personally as someone who was a teen/young adult in the 90s participating in the emerging rave culture, the 90s are dripping with nostalgia.
That being said, I have to agree that the word 'vintage' evokes the 50-70s more than the 90s. Maybe the word has just come to mean that era in the english language, just like 'olden days' tends to mean a pre/semi-industrialized era that's somewhat locked in time.
Perhaps we're running out of words for the past and we simply call these eras by their decades now.
And thanks for the info, I don't have direct experience dealing with EPROM and I had conflated EEPROM and EPROM together in my mind, but a quick google search quickly reveals my inadequate knowledge, which has now been updated, even if only good enough for trivia.
Yeah I remember a friend of mine back around '90 wanted to try it out. I can't remember if it was using DRAM or EPROM memory though. I want to say it was called 'ramra' or 'ramera'.
I almost always think of all the things on breadboards (e.g. in the second picture on the page). But it's probably because of all the games I played had those kinds of things in their technology thumbnails. Or maybe it was because I was alive when Radioshack existed.
They are all GONE. No stock of anything (except the crappy ones, super-tiny packages, high Vgs(th) or high Rds(on) and other leftovers).
I've never seen anything like this, it's kind of frightening. Like walking into a grocery store and seeing the aisles all EMPTY except for a few scraps.
I don't even know where they all went. It's not like you need a TSMC slot to make a FET.
And whatever you look up, Chinese brokers have 10K-50K pieces of them for $25 each. Don't know what to think of that, either.