Semiconductor supply shortages even effecting the auto industry

[Jet_ski]

Summary

Chips used in vehicles are harder to come by because semiconductor manufacturers allocated more capacity to meet soaring demand from consumer-electronics makers such as Apple Inc.

 

Chipmakers favor consumer-electronics customers because their orders are larger than those of automakers. Automaking is also a lower-margin business, leaving manufacturers unwilling to bid up chip prices as they avoid risking their profitability.

 

And while the newest cars require more chips, so do the latest consumer gadgets. Smartphones using so-called 5G connectivity require 40% more semiconductors than older 4G versions. Chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported record fourth-quarter revenue last week, with new 5G iPhones taking up a large chunk of capacity.

 

Foundries such as TSMC, United Microelectronics Corp. and Globalfoundries Inc. as well as chip assemblers like ASE Technology Holding Co. weren’t expanding fast enough to meet the pandemic-induced spike in demand for consumer gadgets. Those bottlenecks snarled the flow of chips not just to cars, but also in Xboxes and Playstations and even certain iPhones. The foundries are responsible for making a significant portion of the world’s semiconductors and serve automotive-chip companies such as NXP Semiconductors NV, Infineon Technologies AG and Renesas Electronics Corp.

 

The Trump administration’s move to blacklist China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. in December drove customers to seek alternatives and further constrained the global chip supply. Some semiconductor buyers have also been building up inventories to hedge against future shortages or disruptions.

 

Auto-chip companies cut orders with Taiwanese foundries significantly in the first half of 2020 and when they wanted the capacity back in the second half, the contract chipmakers had allocated it to others, a person familiar with the matter said.

 

Quotes

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Semiconductor shortages may persist throughout the first half as chipmakers adjust their operations, researcher IHS Market predicted on Dec. 23.

 

Quote

Smartphones using so-called 5G connectivity require 40% more semiconductors than older 4G versions.

 

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General Motors Co. has asked for the Taiwanese government’s help to secure chip supply, and Taiwanese officials have helped to relay the request to foundries including TSMC, according to the person. The European Union has also approached Taiwanese officials about the same issue, the person said.

 

There’s no guarantee such requests will yield results -- smartphone and gadget customers contribute more to foundries’ revenue and profit and are willing to shell out more.

 

Quote

Toyota, Honda, Ford, and other automakers have announced production cuts due to chip shortages. 

 

My thoughts

This report from Bloomberg contains broad detail of the semiconductor supply problems that are effecting so many products.

 

I think a many high demand electronics that are launching in Q1 will be tough to purchase. If chip shortages can effect iPhones, there must be sever shortages. So brace yourselves.

 

Side note: I find it funny that automakers are running to their mommies [govs] to ask TSMC to allocate capacity to them . They shouldn’t have given up half of the capacity that was allocated to them last year.

 

Sources

www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2021-01-11/missing-chips-snarl-car-production-at-factories-worldwide

[jaslion]

I mean this just proves that besides a global economy for parts a local production should also be available in some capacity to be a net to catch sudden rises in demands.

[williamcll]

Certainly interesting to see how incapable every other country outside of East Asia could fabricate chips. Did people really thought Vietnam would become the new silicon valley in just a year with the new sanctions?

[bit]

42 minutes ago, DriftMan said:

Maybe it's time to put a limit to how many phone models a company can launch every year? 2? Okay, 6? Well, okay, 10? Ooff... O-okay, 30? What the fuck?

but they need to give you 6 options from the $800 range to $1000 range. the difference between an 850 phone and a 925 one? huge! 0.2 extra Ghz to uhh.... Gigahertz with!!!!!!!! It's more consumer choice!!!!!

[AndreiArgeanu]

37 minutes ago, williamcll said:

Certainly interesting to see how incapable every other country outside of East Asia could fabricate chips. Did people really thought Vietnam would become the new silicon valley in just a year with the new sanctions?

I don't think anyone did, to be honest semi conductor manufacturing does seem to start being pushed more and more, like China making their own silicon, and now the EU will potentially start to as well considering they just signed a €145 billion declaration to develop next-gen technology that will be most likely used in IOT devices and other places, of course including the automotive industry as well, these shortages may be gone soon.

[Zodiark1593]

59 minutes ago, jaslion said:

I mean this just proves that besides a global economy for parts a local production should also be available in some capacity to be a net to catch sudden rises in demands.

Funny enough, there was a semiconductor fab that used to be close by where I work, and supplied chips to Renesas and directly to auto makers.  It kind of went under a few years ago.

 

[RTX 3090]

Instead of adding more transistor's to their chips, why don't they try to improve the efficiency of their ships (as in optimising it so that the same amount of silicone will give faster performance)

[Zodiark1593]

14 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

Instead of adding more transistor's to their chips, why don't they try to improve the efficiency of their ships (as in optimising it so that the same amount of silicone will give faster performance)

To provide faster performance, the design needs to crunch more numbers in a given time. You do this by either a) running the chip at a higher clock speed, which has well-known implications on power consumption and potential long term reliability (an important factor for automotive applications, and b) scaling up the design to perform more number crunching per clock, which requires more transistors. 
 

The designs used for automotive (engine management, sensors and safety) tend to be specialized real-time CPUs. The designs currently out are already highly optimized for their purpose. 

[RTX 3090]

57 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

The designs used for automotive (engine management, sensors and safety) tend to be specialized real-time CPUs. The designs currently out are already highly optimized for their purpose. 

What about mobiles, instead of giving every new generation more raw number crunching power, why don't they optimise the design of the chip too be more efficient at crunching numbers. That way you would still get slightly faster performance due to the optimisations, it would take less silicone and the battery will last longer. Take for example my Moto G3, original battery, still pretty fast, and the battery is Amazing. I left it playing a YouTube video overnight and it lost only around 50% of charge. Now my Redmi 9A has a much bigger battery, bigger then some flagships, yet it does not last as long as my Moto G3 from 2015. Apparently the phone was optimised to use less battery, using software tweaks, why can't they do that with all phones. And if people prefer extra performance then battery, since the chips is running more efficiently, they can just slightly bump up the clock speed with a software tweak

[jagdtigger]

5 minutes ago, RTX 3090 said:

why can't they do that with all phones.

Because $$$$

[cj09beira]

1 hour ago, RTX 3090 said:

What about mobiles, instead of giving every new generation more raw number crunching power, why don't they optimise the design of the chip too be more efficient at crunching numbers. That way you would still get slightly faster performance due to the optimisations, it would take less silicone and the battery will last longer. Take for example my Moto G3, original battery, still pretty fast, and the battery is Amazing. I left it playing a YouTube video overnight and it lost only around 50% of charge. Now my Redmi 9A has a much bigger battery, bigger then some flagships, yet it does not last as long as my Moto G3 from 2015. Apparently the phone was optimised to use less battery, using software tweaks, why can't they do that with all phones. And if people prefer extra performance then battery, since the chips is running more efficiently, they can just slightly bump up the clock speed with a software tweak

because specially on arm, the socs are already pretty efficient, and it always much harder to get that little extra efficiency using just design (without using new nodes), on the software side it might be a bit easier but with screens using most of the energy in a phone how long a phone lasts is very much in the hands of consumers as to where they set their screen luminosity to.

i would love the return of retractable baterries though as there used be custom double sized batteries with new back cover that were just great 

like this

Spoiler

 

[RTX 3090]

1 hour ago, cj09beira said:

always much harder to get that little extra efficiency using just design (without using new nodes)

they have multi billion pound engineering teams for a reason. It's free performance they are missing out on

[cj09beira]

19 minutes ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

It isn't free performance if you're paying for engineers to iterate designs and find out where you can get that architectural speedups. Not to mention it is directly related with the workloads. You may get 20% IPC increase for some very specific application, and lose 5% in all others. Hardware Unboxed review on Smart Access Memory (SAM) makes this very clear.

although in that case its probably related to the issue of badly coded games

[eddiemcgarrigle]

21 hours ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

I don't think anyone did, to be honest semi conductor manufacturing does seem to start being pushed more and more, like China making their own silicon, and now the EU will potentially start to as well considering they just signed a €145 billion declaration to develop next-gen technology that will be most likely used in IOT devices and other places, of course including the automotive industry as well, these shortages may be gone soon.

Quite a few semiconductor plants in Scotland, a wee ramping up of production could prove quite lucrative.