doesn't sound good (chip shortage to actually worsen)
- Thread starter earthbound
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This article show a lack of semiconductor procurement knowledge. At the start of the pandemic, the auto companies cut their chip orders because they forecasted a big auto sales slowdown. Well, that slowdown was pretty short; companies shot themselves in the foot. Problem is, for chip manufacturers changed over to other orders. In this business, changover is a very big deal; it takes time and can be millions of dollars. Additionally, the Renesas (Japan) fab had a large fire and was down until May 2021; I believe they are back at full capacity now. Renesas makes nearly a third of the microcontroller chips used in cars around the world.
Companies like TSMC (biggest chip mfr) prefer to make the densest chips which are more profitable.
After the physical chip is fabbed, its firmware, or low level code, must be programmed for its intended use. NVIDIA is known for programming automobile chips.
There is only 1 car company who programs their own chips which turned out to be a big boon, as existing chips could be reprogrammed enabling chip repurpose.
FYI, Ford has announced plans to bring chip firmware programming un house, which I believe is a really smart move. I would expect others to follow suit.
Oh great just another way for Ford to screw up their vehicles.
Or maybe the sales are in double digit toilet despite increased production over last year because we all know what we are currently in, so they have to cut production big time and it is simply easy to blame chip shortage, real or imagined doesn’t matter, people heard of it, so hardly anyone will give it a second thought.
Cars sales Aug 2022
Production 2022
Cars sales Aug 2022
Production 2022
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Vertical integration, bro. Software is king and will be even more so going forward.
Maybe Ford should pay more attention to making better vehicles and leave the chips to others.
I really wish American car assemblers could be the standard of the world in quality.
The chip shortage is real and it affects a lot more than the auto industry. Problem is when all the chip fabs shut down for COVID. It took a long time to ramp up and they can't keep up. Some processors have over a year lead time and many places won't even take orders because it will probably get worse. We are redesigning products for parts that we can get. It taking up a lot of resources and my company is very low volume compared to auto manufacturers.
I'll have to see that to believe it. Unless they already owned a fab, I doubt they could get up and running that quick.
Fabbing the wafers is only the 1st problem; programming the firmware is the bigger problem.
Kia/Hyundai is not gonna build a fab; that costs billions.
Hyundai was in the chip business before they made cars. I don't know if that division was bought out or only renamed.
It'd be smart for Ford to make many different things with one chip type and different software, then they could jump the backlog at factories by ordering a large number.
It'd be smart for Ford to make many different things with one chip type and different software, then they could jump the backlog at factories by ordering a large number.
Spot on. I forgot the Hyundai fabs! The companies I worked for, Novellus (deposition) and Lam Research (etch) shipped machines to them.
Korea is a huge SEMI region; think Samsung who is only 2nd to TSMC.
Korea has their own electronics producers, Hyundai/Kia will get help from Samsung and such as it'd boost both their profits and end car buyer wouldn't be too shocked with a $200-500 car price increase in these times.
I have to believe they already do, but who knows? With the current problems you can order a large number, but that doesn't mean you are going to get them. I'm sure a company like Ford would have more pull and money to get what they want, but sometimes they can't be made fast enough.
Unless it is a new chip design they are probably tweaking existing firmware for each chips. This is the preferred way to do things as less changes means less risk, and firmware is one heck of a thing that is harder to debug (other than ROM code or verilog). For combustion engine they likely are tweaking as needed unless a completely new architecture is needed on a completely new generation of stuff. It is probably easier to have the chip or controller companies (Denso, Bosch, Deiphi, etc) to do the whole architecture then share between multiple customers.
Ford doing firmware inhouse would probably be just like AWS and MSFT doing their own data center hardware, more as a hedge for price negotiation.
Another thing is automotive chips are usually low value low profit margin compare to, say the GPUs, crypto miner asic, cell phone asic, AMD CPU, etc. So once they cancelled their order last year as ypw said, they probably couldn't afford to bump AMD, nVidia, bitmain, etc out again.
They may order chips the same way some OEM (say Denso or Bosch) order them from the asic vendor (say Motorolla or Renesas), they likely would come with some reference design that OEM build on top of, charge some extra for profit, and Ford decided they can either negotiate a better deal if they have another source (internal, 2nd vendor) to compete with, and build their own based on the asic reference design.
They can also hire people from competitors and vendors in a no non-compete clause state like California.
It used to be that Motorola a lot of silicon to the automotive industry even to the point of them making ECMs, and GM had an in-house electronics divison(Delco Electronics). A lot of the Denso/Hitachi/Oki branded silicon in Japanese cars were actually made by NEC and Hitachi - who are now Renesas.
Yep, a lot of cars use PowerPC or SuperH architectures - a flavor of RISC. Your car isn’t too far off from a iMac/PowerMac of the 1990s-2006, Xbox 360, or a Super Nintendo/Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis/Saturn or PlayStation 1/2. ARM is now making its way into cars, Tesla is actually using AMD’s Zen 2 APUs that aren’t too far off from a Ryzen CPU with integrated graphics - VW uses Nvidia Tegra SoCs in Audis.
The small stuff - ASICs, FPGAs, and small discrete devices while essential don’t bring the fabs(notably TSMC but there’s smaller fabs as well as Samsung, NXP/Freescale and the Chinese fabs) the money. TSMC is in bed with Apple, AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Samsung fabs for other companies but they also supply a lot of DRAM and NAND so they’re constrained in Korea and Austin. There’s plenty of CPUs/MCUs/SOCs but not the smaller, but equally or more important chips like drivers, regulators, transceivers, MOSFETs, and other general purpose ICs.
My line of work currently have a shortage of some power circuit chip, and we are forced to "upgrade" to automotive grade stuff and pay more. Since our profit margin is higher than a typical car (say about 60% gross) and we use a lot more than a car per $20k of product sold (about 5x more), we will bump those automotive chips out of other cars out there.
People are buying a lot more stuff since working from home. I would say most likely double the amount of monitors and almost 4x the amount of Chromebooks.
People are buying a lot more stuff since working from home. I would say most likely double the amount of monitors and almost 4x the amount of Chromebooks.
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