General > General Technical Chat
How is Chipageddon affecting you?
SiliconWizard:
Anyway, the shortage seems to be easing indeed. A number of parts are starting to reappear in reasonable quantities.
Whether it's just temporary or not, I don't know.
And, whether it's a good sign or not - unfortunately, I strongly suspect it is just recession rearing its ugly head.
But fact is, I can actually get parts at the moment.
tom66:
It's not temporary (well - not on any reasonable timescale). You can see most parts are legitimately coming back into stock.
The biggest headache is still FPGAs, SoCs and anything at high process nodes. For instance, it's still very hard to get anything made by Samsung on the ~40-65nm nodes (Spartan-6 at 45nm I believe, Microsemi Igloo2 FPGA's at 65nm).
However, in other areas, I think what we're seeing is that inventories at buyers have filled up, and combined with a reduction in demand due to inflationary pressures, it's led to the market normalising somewhat.
We are still taking the precautionary approach and buying enough stock well before any order is made, but we're no longer panicking around redesigning things to fit different parts on. We can usually get what we need within a few months, if we have to go to component brokers.
It's as most forecasts projected: shortages in '20 and '21, some slow return to normal in '22 and almost normal by '23. Probably by '24 it will be an unpleasant memory and almost everything in stock. Just in time for the recession to end!
AndyC_772:
I've spent the whole day ordering parts for a short production run. It's weird what's available and what's not.
I can get any passives I like, which wasn't the case during the great capacitor shortage a few years back. Of course, it helps that they're generic enough that I can choose from different suppliers, but even odd values in 0.1% were readily available.
(As an aside, is it new that Digi-key now only do full reels, or 1+ qty pricing which is dramatically higher, and nothing in between? It makes no sense to buy, say, a strip of 100 resistors from them, when Mouser etc still do price breaks at reasonable quantities for prototyping).
Some very simple parts like connectors are still out of stock. My favourite 2.5mm JST crimp headers had to come from LCSC, whom I regard as something of a last resort due to their shipping costs and the fact that they're non-franchised.
Other parts, which I expected to be unavailable, actually were. STM32F407, for example. Yes, really - there are a few parts you can actually buy, in quantity and from multiple sources. Hurrah!
No such luck for the TI ADC I needed, though. Their own web store showed 360 in stock, but they'd mysteriously vanished by the time I tried to checkout 30 of them. Thanks, TI, that's another design I'm migrating to a competitor without a moment's hesitation.
Power supplies, displays - not a problem, at least in the small quantities I needed. Discrete semiconductors, no issue, except for ESD diodes which have been particularly troublesome this last year and still seem in short supply.
Bottom line: I'm still having to do a redesign of one board, but it's a pretty minor one... swap a TI part for a Microchip, who seem to have kept at least some parts flowing this whole time (except for certain whole ranges of PICs, but that's a gripe for another day).
Mangozac:
How are you guys going with getting stocks of SMD electrolytic capacitors? They have been almost as bad as ICs these past 6 months.
SilverSolder:
Top tip: the Baltic Dry Index measures the cost of shipping goods worldwide. When the index goes up, it means the economy is on the boil and stuff is being shipped in massive quantities - demand very high. It is quite a good proxy indicator for how the world economy is doing.
There seems to be some correlation between the index and the chip shortage... and also with the increased availability we are seeing now.
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