from Hacker News

A big hurdle to fixing the chip shortage: substrates

by noir-york on 9/6/21, 9:39 PM with 124 comments

  • by neonate on 9/7/21, 3:26 PM

  • by cure on 9/7/21, 6:35 PM

    From TFA:

    > By 2025, she foresees demand for around 185 million square feet of advanced substrate manufacturing space against about 145 million square feet built.

    It's curious that the production capacity for substrate is expressed in terms of manufacturing space. Is that an industry-specific quirk?

  • by lovich on 9/7/21, 8:47 PM

    >Now major chip companies are resorting to unusual tactics. They are placing orders far in advance and prepaying so that substrate companies have ample cash to build more factories. Some are committing to buying the entire supply of new production lines to give their suppliers confidence to invest.

    If the chip makers are investing this much money into the substrate businesses, why aren't they just purchasing some of these companies wholesale?

  • by Robotbeat on 9/7/21, 5:35 PM

    It’s strange that this happened. Did COVID just cause everyone to stop investing for a bit, leading to all these downstream problems? Or was this gonna happen anyway?

  • by rpaddock on 9/8/21, 12:12 PM

    The archive.is link at the top no longer works. This one is currently working:

    http://www.coppernews.io/2021/09/05/a-big-hurdle-to-fixing-t...

  • by blacktriangle on 9/8/21, 12:44 PM

    Has anybody ever considered that better software may be a part of the solution to the chip shortage? Going back to actually caring about things like efficiency and using the hardware properly instead of living in layers of software abstraction miles high? We put men on the moon with chips that could probably be manufactured in somebody's basement. We easily fulfill society's NEEDs with that level of hardware, we just need to give up streaming gigs of Netflix through our Electron apps to make it happen.

  • by davidw on 9/7/21, 11:30 PM

    I am imagining the 'plastics!' scene from The Graduate, but with 'substrates!'.

  • by analog31 on 9/7/21, 11:27 PM

    Would smaller wafers help? They're thinner. I was surprised by the thickness of a 300mm wafer.

  • by ggalaxximm on 9/8/21, 3:34 PM

    The reason you can't get a PS5 is because China is deliberately messing with the supply chain, because of Trump's mini-trade-war with them in 2017-2020, which they have not forgotten.

  • by usui on 9/7/21, 7:52 PM

    Lol every time I see the word "feet" I'm reminded that this article isn't targeted to anyone but Americans, even when talking about manufacturing lines in Asia. My East Asian bias is showing but in all my experience I absolutely have never had to use those units in a serious professional context. Any time I see a technically-sounding article use units like "feet" and "football fields" I subconsciously find it very difficult to take anything afterward seriously.

    I admit it's irrational since units are arbitrary and orthogonal anyway, but it seems... forced. Is it really necessary to use those units in a technical context in order to relate to your readers?

    EDIT: Lots of America-centric people are jumping onto me for this initial comment, stating that WSJ is built for its /true/ target audience, /Americans/. What sparked my comment was the fact I was reading this article in Japanese. The aforementioned numbers and graph are expressed in feet, so this kind of forced conversion across industry domain and language barrier seemed contrived and got me started on this train of thought.

    https://jp.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-shortage-has-made-a-sta...