Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains?

madax asks: "Well..yeah..I am doing some graduate level research in identifying choke points in the electronics supply chain, trying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry, critical processes owned by maybe a select few players and potential information distortion mechanisms that could be used by a few select players in the supply chain to disrupt the entire industry. Can anyone help me by pointing to interesting examples from your experience?"

Comments

Re:Memory.

[reinard]

Although you're right, I think the original poster was referring to the incident a year or two back where a rather serious earthquake in Taiwan took out one of the factorys that produce the wafers which are used to make most kinds of memory chips. If I remember right there are very, very few factorys that produce them... you can probably count them on one hand. But I don't think it really caused an actual shortage in ram chips, the market always over-reacts and prices fluctuate wildly (in this case they went up significatnly for 5 or 6 months, until the factory was repaired).