Are chips coming available?

wnjj wrote:
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Yes. Not many companies making these old design chips anymore. The big 3 have been loathe to change to newer chip technology and now the birds have come home to roost. Tesla uses new chip tech and has not had nearly the issues as the Big 3. Of course Tesla is a fairly new company which helped them a lot with this issue.

Samsung is building a new chip plant near Austin Texas for a mere $17 billion. It is expected to take 3 years to build. I hope that we can wait that long. It is a shame that we are relying on a foreign company to build that plant. We still may not be independent of other countries even after that plant is built.

Samsung Texas plant

wanderingaimlessly, Great question

Few know that the GDP per capita of Taiwan is higher than Japan = Japan has a GDP per capita of $42,900 as of 2017, while in Taiwan, the GDP per capita is $50,500 as of 2017. This stuff is in part of what my last job was before retiring

Yes, political issues affect economic hugely

Another question to ask: between Japan and Taiwan, which is the better or stronger American ally ?

America is finally waking up to what they did to shoot themselves in the foot and there is still time. First the upper management of corporate America and finally...now 'some' of the general public. Though, there are still way too many who insist on the 'cheapest at any cost'...and...that cost is at the expense of American jobs, etc.

A chip foundry costs $1B-$2B *MINIMUM*, plus the tooling for each different type of chip within or based on that process. Plus the training of the people directly and the millions of support folks in that new food chain. Yes, many aspects are the same as older processes and is where retention of works a key component of getting new foundries up and running...and...continuing to run well.

Since so many in here seem to follow this closely, a question,,,
With Taiwan under constant threat by China, and South Korea by the North, how hard would either of those potential wars harm the rest of the world?
It seems from the above comments both potential victim nations are major players in world production.

ItsyRV wrote:
What I don't understand is why we have so much excess chip manufacturing capacity sitting idle here in the USA?

It seems every time we hear of a chip shortage, suddenly these US based manufactures produce all sorts of plans to turn on production at these idle plants IF the government would just throw in some money. I would think demand is high enough to make producing chips in the US profitable. Or is this just another run on tax payer money to build a plant that isn't really needed?
(I think those of you in AZ, NV and TX knows what I'm talking about with those idle taxpayer funded chip plants)

The simple explanation is that chip manufacturing foundries are not interchangeable. They are purpose-built for a specific technology. Converting chip designs from one technology to another takes months to years.

Also, some automotive chips are built on older technology and it would take an awful lot of incentive to build capacity for an otherwise outdated technology.

theoldwizard1 wrote:
What few people know is the fact that Ford DID try to design their own chips but could not get any of the major "fabs" to play along !

Ford Microelectronics was founded in 1982, while Ford still owned Ford Aerospace (a minor defense/weapons contractor) and long before they spun off Visteon. They closed shop in 1999.

The only thing that they had a hand in designing was the EEC-V chip (aka 8065). The EEC-IV chip (8061) was designed and fabbed by Intel. The commercialized version of this chip was the 8096.

In the 22 years since Ford gave up on their own chips Tesla came along and made it work. Ford has been losing market share and Tesla has been gaining. The old companies are finally starting to learn some valuable lessons from the upstart and are coming out with some cutting edge products. I just hope that they are more successful than GM's EV efforts so far.

What I don't understand is why we have so much excess chip manufacturing capacity sitting idle here in the USA?

It seems every time we hear of a chip shortage, suddenly these US based manufactures produce all sorts of plans to turn on production at these idle plants IF the government would just throw in some money. I would think demand is high enough to make producing chips in the US profitable. Or is this just another run on tax payer money to build a plant that isn't really needed?
(I think those of you in AZ, NV and TX knows what I'm talking about with those idle taxpayer funded chip plants)

mkirsch wrote:

Gooma wrote:
the auto makers are profitting from this so called chip shortage. If they weren't thay would charter a cargo plane and go get them some chips.

How many chips could they load on a 747 cargo plane?
It's the same with all these other shortages. If the companies weren't profitting from the shortage they would fix it.

Go get them, from where, exactly?

There are, well were, no chips to be "gotten."

Several companies have been trying to bypass the boats but in the process created a new logjam.

Chicago freight congestion

Gooma wrote:
the auto makers are profitting from this so called chip shortage. If they weren't thay would charter a cargo plane and go get them some chips.

How many chips could they load on a 747 cargo plane?
It's the same with all these other shortages. If the companies weren't profitting from the shortage they would fix it.

Go get them, from where, exactly?

There are, well were, no chips to be "gotten."

FWC wrote:
Not even Apple makes it's own processors/ICs, they license the architecture from ARM in the UK and have the chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC).

Apple has a very unique licensing agreement with ARM. No one knows exactly what is says, but no one else has such a good agreement !

Apple spent big bucks hiring the best chip designers they could. Their primary goal was to design integrated graphics (they are currently working hard at designing modems now in order to get out of an unfavorable license agreement). They have, with ARM's blessing, included a few changes into the basic architecture of the processor core. I am not sure if ARM is passing this on to other customers.

The real point is, no auto company would pony up the salary to get "the best and the brightest" IC designers. Even if the dangled huge $$$, would those people leave Silcon Valley (or the Texas Silicon Area) to move to the Midwest ????

And as stated, manufacturing those chips is whole different story.

Ford gave up making steel many years ago. Last I heard (over 20 years ago) Ford does NOT cast/forge any iron/steel or aluminum.