How will 'chipageddon' affect you?
All these articles seem to miss the point between <i>why</i> the car industry is facing shortages, and conflate it with the shortages on high end silicon devices (which have very different causes).<p>High end devices have seen a massive bottleneck on TSMC and in some of the required materials like ABF, combined with very high demand (new console cycle, people buying new computers for work&#x2F;study from home).<p>The automotive sector suffers from another problem. For decades all manufacturers have converted to JIT (lean manufacturing), which means that most of them counted on almost daily deliveries of parts to keep operating. With the transport restrictions and difficulties on many countries, this has become unmanageable and unwieldy, and factory operators have made the obvious call, increase stock margins. Typically a factory might keep stock enough for a day of operations.<p>A manager sees that they will have problems getting their deliveries in time, so increases their orders to cover a week. This depletes the local distributor that also tries to avoid keeping large stocks. Now a lot of other managers in other companies see that part vanish, and fearing that they’ll be out of parts, they increase their stock keeping too. With boards having from 100 to 1000 unique references, the effects propagate from one manufacturer to another, while everyone runs to get enough stock to avoid having to close.<p>There has been no less parts than one year ago, but the massive “de-risking” means that there’s now too much demand to keep everyone happy.