“The problem with MCUs is that it’s not one or two parts it’s like 100 different parts that are low-volume products,” Russ says. Russ noted that unlike in the CPU world, which has Intel and AMD and then “scenery-chewing extras,” the MCU space is a dozen different companies of roughly equal size. microcontroller units, or MCUs), Avnet found. That availability is particularly low for microcontrollers (a.k.a. Product designers, engineers, and tech specialists who participated in the survey, she says, these days “have to think about availability from day one.” It was based on the technology-you pass it to the sourcing organization, you move that into production,” says Peggy Carrieres, Avnet’s vice president of global sales enablement and supplier development.
“In the past, design was separate from procurement. It’s a real-world component of the landscape that’s fundamentally altering how technologists, designers, and engineers work-and could just as readily affect what tech is made, by whom, and when. Russ stresses that tech workers shouldn’t view the crunch as a temporary problem to work around when designing. “It’s got to become part of the engineer’s lexicon, and we’ve got to figure out better ways to be more agile.” “Just as have had to think about manufacturability and testability, we need to start thinking about ‘procurability,’” says Samuel Russ, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of South Alabama. This finding and more (see below) highlights how the chip shortage will alter technology-and tech jobs-for years to come. The study found 64 percent of the global engineers polled say their companies are increasingly designing products based on the availability of components, rather than just following their preferences, regardless of availability. The lack of chips is already fueling changes in the design of future products, delaying the next generations of devices, and forcing engineers to come up with all manner of Plan Bs, according to a new survey from Avnet. So the shortage isn’t just affecting the availability of current gadgets. Yuh-Jier Mii, R&D chief at the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., recently told Spectrum he personally believes it will take two to three years to get enough new fabrication facilities on line to adequately address the shortfall.
COVID gets a lot of the blame-and it sure didn’t help-but the fact is, the proliferation of gadgets in everyday life had been a slow-moving train that was long on track to disrupting the semiconductor supply/demand balance. The global chip shortage’s effect on current products is clear in just about every consumer market in the developed world, reflected in half-empty car dealerships and shuttered manufacturing lines.
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