Semiconductor Supply Chain Issues

You clearly don't know how the semiconducter supply chain works. All of this stuff is made in asia and changes hands 3 or 4 times before it makes it's way into a distribution channel. Unless you are buying straight from ftdi, there's a chance these can end up in your products. Same goes with most commodity ICs.

Is there some unobtainable chip on the board that other manufacturers need and are buying up?

"mass produced hardware doesn’t run into the problem"Happens all the time, as a production model may take a long time to make it through development and lab certification.In general, large firms will try to warehouse spools for some bespoke design, but the 3 year contact-oxidation garbage-clock starts the second the component spool/tray leaves the manufacturer.Thus, one may try to mitigate supply chain instability, but in the end you are still just better off avoiding uni

For things like Retina LCDs they make strategic long-term arrangements. For screws and resistors &c, anyone can just buy them. Even Apple's demand for screws is not a significant fraction of China's output.

I don't think that's a very helpful takeaway from the situation.Early in my career as an EE, I learned that your world could suddenly be upset and swaths of components could suddenly become unavailable to the small manufacturer because an auto company or some other massive customer got preference, so the majority of parts went "on allocation." Meaning that the production runs were allocated to certain customers and if you were lucky then you got the leftovers. You could su

It's my current living nightmare. Endless treadmill of:1. Our contract manufacturer calls in a panic no longer able to obtain/was shorted on a shipment of part XYZ. XYZ is increasingly becoming random "jellybean" parts like MOSFETS, oscillators, to slightly-more-complicated but not "fancy" stuff like serial transceivers, USB stuff, NOR flash, load switches. TI is the bane of my existence currently.2. Search for a drop-in or near drop-in replacement. There are

I doubt it works like that. I imagine that they have a load of parts already purchased, and probably some spare labour time. Supply chains don't just stop when you click your fingers.

Don't care about NDAs as much. At least not as much as about cut tape availability at the usual distributors. I'm fine as long as I can buy 100 chips at mouser instead of buying an obscure reel in shenzen (as might be the case for hdmi transceivers btw). They mentioned a couple chip manufacturers in the announcement, so I'm hoping they will follow through with that, or at the least, make modules available.The same has been going on for digital radio recently. Only silabs have d

I found that the chips for a project that I am working on are no longer available and I got the lead time of 13 months, without guarantee. It essentially means that I have to redesign the project using different part which may take me few months and I have no guarantee the other chip I choose will be available. The problem is, however, that I can see those chips available in their thousands on aliexpress and similar sites for 10x the price. I also read on forums that Chinese entrepreneurs buy al

and one can only hope that sony et al manage their supply chain by switching to a different chip entirely