[ferros]

> Production of low-margin processors, such as those used to weigh clothes in a washing machine or toast bread in a smart toaster, has also been hit. While most retailers are still able to get their hands on these products at the moment, they may face issues in the months ahead.

I understand why the new advanced chips could face shortages, but why are there shortages for these basic chips. Can’t they be made anywhere, and more easily?

[ajross]

> why are there shortages for these basic chips? Can’t they be made anywhere, and more easily?

Not really. Semiconductor fabs are built around "tools" from manufacturers like AMAT and Nikon. Those tool vendors make most of their money from selling new tools for fancy new processes, not supporting 20-year-old stuff. Eventually stuff breaks, and fabs have to offline these older processes.

The way this works in the tech industry is that "chips" are actually software, so if your old manufacturer isn't keeping up you resynthesize your VHDL or Verilog for a new fab, rev your board design or whatever, and keep going.

But other industries aren't so agile. They have older designs without design teams to support them, or even chip designs that they retain only as masks and not HDL. Those parts don't port cleanly to newer high-volume logic.

[gostsamo]

Actually, ASML provides lifetime support for their machines. I don't know for the rest.

[xadhominemx]

> Eventually stuff breaks, and fabs have to offline these older processes.

Absolutely not. You just made this up.

[blueblisters]

It’s not just about supporting new processes. Many tool/machine vendors are backlogged by years because they simply don’t have the capacity to make more than a few of those machines every year. Even if someone wanted to invest in new manufacturing, they would likely have to wait a few years to start production.

Secondly, some legacy manufacturers of semiconductor parts lost money on their capacity-building investments during the dot-com burst. The semiconductor industry is brutal and there is a genuine fear that overcapacity will make it hard to deal with any bust that happens after this boom.

[simias]

I don't know but maybe one of the factors is that given how cheap microntrollers have become it's not uncommon to use an "overpowered" integrated chip just for ease of development. Suppose that you have to drive some LEDs on a washing machine, do you bother developing some optimized bespoke circuitry with discrete components or do you just slap a ~2$ 100+MHz 32bit Cortex controller that will let you implement all the logic in C and just reflash if you find an issue?

[alexc05]

It makes me wonder if it would be possible to build a chip-manufacturing plant for any reasonable amount of money to produce these chips that don't need to be 7nm GPU powerhouses, but like the old clunker chips that can't get attention from the big guys.

Almost like starting a "generics" business in pharma medication but for older chipsets.

I'm sure there's a great trade to be had in producing the lower end stuff.

[makapuf]

You can also put a 16MHz 8bit which can cost you a few dozens of cents max (Outside of shortage)

[judge2020]

With the amount of horrible infotainment systems in the wild i honestly doubt they’re using overpowered chips. I’m sure any consumer grade APU (ie. CPU with an iGPU) from the past 5 years would do better than the chips currently in cars.

[krapht]

Eh, no, that's not how it works in high-volume manufacturing. There are 70 million washing machines sold per year. Suppose your large conglomerate employer sells 0.7% of that total, or 700,000 units. It doesn't take much of a per-unit savings to pay for the salary of a FTE to optimize the design.

[dehrmann]

It doesn't matter for this, but it's definitely the case in the hobbyist segment. Look at how many people use Raspberry Pis for things better suited to a microcontroller.

[jleahy]

There’s still a limit to the production capacity available, these are still incredibly complex manufacturing processes, just not cutting edge.

Personally my take away from that was “what is a smart toaster and why would anyone need that”.

[jamiek88]

My understanding is there is a substrate shortage as well as a foundry slot shortage.

[monocasa]

And even then, process nodes aren't fungible. Taping out a design for a totally new (to you) node is probably at least a year of time. And for what? Will the chip shortage be over then anyway?

[jpm_sd]

This is correct. The industry is currently constrained on everything from water to wafers, in addition to fab time slots. Everyone is panic buying too, so shortages are getting amplified.

[varispeed]

It is a new Bitcoin for Chinese businessmen and they buy up all stocks and stockpile. If you go on Chinese sites, you can buy any chips you want even thousands of them. Of course you'll pay 10x the price and have a high chance getting a counterfeit product.