big shortage of ST micros

[f4eru]

Hello guys,
There seems to be a huge shortage those days of many refs of ST micros.
How do you handle this ? have a buffer ? change of family F1-> F4 etc ? Has someone switched to chinese clones ?

[tunk]

If memory serves, I think there's already 3-4 threads about this.

[Siwastaja]

Many threads.

Unless you noticed, it's most component types across most manufacturers.

There is this component crisis again. Meaning, supply chain predicted wrong, shut down production, demand exceeded supply, backlog ensued. But manufacturers can't increase production because that would require new investments which would be at high risk of being underutilized later.

If old signs are to be trusted again, when the crisis starts, delivery estimates go a year or 1.5 years forward, then no delivery estimates are given at all. Usually, if you can just wait it out, you suddenly notice you'll get the parts after all after about half a year.

The worst thing you can do is panic and redesign. Others do that as well, and end up designing in the same replecement part you did. Now everybody's ordering that part that's seemingly in stock, but the same production issues exist for that. So now you changed to another part you can't get. Now you are redesigning again, and at the same time, the original part reappears on stock.

Of course, if you can do a very quick redesign cycle and order the replacements immediately for the whole batch, then this works out.

[f4eru]

Interesting view.
don't panic

[thm_w]

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/stmicroelectronics-shortage/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/manufacture/stm-st-nothing-in-stock/
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/stm32-weird-availability/

[Siwastaja]

Also I started a thread about Bosch Sensortec being practically completely out of stock of most products with no delivery estimates.

[Rudolph Riedel]

The weird thing is that ST lists the controllers as "active" and in "full production".
I would like to buy a couple of STM32H7B0RBT6 but can't.
There are three alternatives with the same features I need but more flash memory, also nothing available.

These are produced in China and the whole production probably goes to one customer and ends up in some toy.

[DavidAlfa]

What the cause of that?
The fabs, being 90% automated, is it really the coronavirus?
Or just a trick to raise the prices?
I know Nvidia and AMD are having issues because a huge % of the production goes to consoles, and the left is taken by the miners.
They patched the drivers to block mining speed but they "forgot" to do it with the later update.
But that's not related, stm32 are not using 5-7nm TSMC lithography.
I guess it's all for the money.

[Siwastaja]

What the cause of that?
The fabs, being 90% automated, is it really the coronavirus?

The cause is not simple.

There is nothing new, component crises come and go, some are worse than others.

Just 3 years (in 2018 if I recall correctly) ago was the sudden catastrophic shortage of MLCCs and the associated panic. Then it just self-rectified in about 3-6 months, as usual. There was no pandemic, no earthquake or large fire in any factory, no simple explanation like that.

It's just that in modern high-tech, making investments to scale up production is extremely expensive, the payback period may be decades even if everything goes well.

So it makes sense to run all fabrication resources at near full power.

Now the problem is the finicky feedback loop with positive feedback mechanism; a small disturbance (drop in production; but can be just a slight increase in demand) causes unavailability, which causes panic buying and stockpiling, which causes more unavailability. And because neither demand is going down nor production is going up, and because production's already running at say 95%, if you increase it to 100% it takes long to rectify even a short backlog of orders!

Regarding COVID, my understanding is that component manufacturers expected decrease in manufacture of electronics, i.e., orders going down, and reduced production to avoid overproducing. The opposite happened; people started buying electronics more than ever to spend time in lockdown. I'm sure production is mostly back to 100% already, and demand is already down to normal levels, but it will take months to get back into normal availability numbers.

ST's strike in France didn't help but is only a small part of the story, actual fab is obviously not in France.

[peter-h]

In this business, the tendency is for prices to keep falling.

At some point the sales reps start spreading rumours about the dreaded A-word "allocation".

About 6-12m later, buyers get scared and place long orders, so lead times go up.

Then everybody panics.

6-12 months later it is back to the usual bloodbath and low prices

The solution is to keep a strategic stock of key parts, and treat all reports of shortages *coming from distributors* as bollox

I've been in manufacturing since 1978...

[crossroad]

I've noticed the STM8S003F3 chips that I used to get for less than $0.30 at 50 qty are now well over $1.5 apiece. Wild.

Also, looks like one manufacturer is having a hard time with literal fire at their production facility

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Tech/Semiconductors/Chip-starved-automakers-shudder-at-Renesas-plant-s-1-month-halt

^ From the images it looks like it's gonna be more than a month of delay

[David Hess]

What the cause of that?
The fabs, being 90% automated, is it really the coronavirus?

The fabs are dependent on the supply of materials that they use and their output still has to be packaged and tested.

[SiliconWizard]

What the cause of that?
The fabs, being 90% automated, is it really the coronavirus?

The fabs are dependent on the supply of materials that they use and their output still has to be packaged and tested.

Yeah. Well if someone thinks a foundry can run without operators, I suggest they visit one sometime.
TSMC, for instance, has 50k+ employees. And guess what, a large chunk of them are actually useful.

[Doctorandus_P]

A few years back the computer magazine "C't"  published quite a lot of info about a custom designed measurement system. I think it was designed in-house by them as a system to do automated measurements on the PC systems they test.