Ask HN: As small-fry needing custom PCBs, how to deal with Covid part shortage? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As small-fry needing custom PCBs, how to deal with Covid part shortage?

4 pointsdognotdog2 comments

I'm in the position of having to order batches of ~50 boards at a time, and since the beginning of this year more and more electronic parts have been out of stock, even though we designed everything for normally in-stock parts.

Crystals, real-time clocks, solid-state sensors, MCUs, amplifiers, a lot of what's in IoT devices, are now up in 30-52 week lead time range. Often there aren't even alternatives that could be used on a redesigned board. STM, NXP, TI, Bosch, almost any brand seems to be affected.

Does anyone have any insight into where everything went? Are the parts being hoarded, or has there been a genuine large slump in part production or assembly going through the roof?

Are there platforms outside of the regular big distributors (eg. digikey/mouser/etc) where the elusive parts are potentially being traded in low volumes?

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> Does anyone have any insight into where everything went?

I've been pondering this one myself.

Back when we were using UMC as our foundry, they made us sign some kind of waiver/disclaimer for an MPW, acknowledging that for 200mm wafer runs our mask data would be "accessible to PRC nationals". PRC = mainland China. 200mm is mainly older processes; this was a 180nm chip. UMC is forthright about the fact that they have some older fabs on the mainland, but the waiver was so broad and vague it made me wonder if they had outsourced far more of the 200mm wafer production than was publicly acknowledged.

I'm wondering if a whole bunch of the not-bleeding-edge wafer manufacturers (ST, NXP, etc) did the same thing, setting up extra production lines in China to run their older processes. I'm sure the CPC would offer exceptionally attractive incentives for them to do this, even if the processes are dated. If this is what happened, it (a) soaked up a ton of used 200mm fab equipment the past few years and (b) resulted in these companies having a big chunk of their production in the PRC.

Then the CPC throws a tantrum over the whole tech embargo thing and says "no exports from those lines". The fab owners (ST, NXP, etc) are left scrambling and are desperate not to acknowledge the extent to which they offshored their manufacturing. After all, according to the official statistics the West imports only a tiny sliver of its silicon from China.

Alright, time to hang up the tinfoil hat now...

I'm sure a lot of the MEMS sensors, etc, are indeed on those wafers. A large chunk of that and analog / hybrid circuitry is dominated by structures that don't benefit from super high density processes and large surface area wafers.

That the incentives would be so lopsided and the corporate structures so opaque as for it all to be politically driven is a scary thought, though…

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