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Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains?

Posted by Cliff on from the identifying-the-bottlenecks dept.

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?"

3 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Check out... by Muad'Dave · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Tantalum, which is used in high-grade capacitors. Last I heard, it was mined in Africa by essentially slave labor, and the tantalum fields are small and owned by a cartel.

    --
    Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
  2. Sole source parts and microcontrollers by Matt_Bennett · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sole source parts are always a bad thing to have, but if they are the normal jellybean parts (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc.) you can usually work around and find an adequate substitute in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand programmable parts tend to have unique code- that can't easily (or quickly) be transferred from one part to another.

    A case in point from my own experience about 2.5 years ago- flash memory had a huge upswing in demand- I believe it was from cell-phones. It was so lucrative, that Atmel switched its fabs over to producing lots of flash memory, and putting us microcontroller users on allocation- we went from a 6 week lead time on production quantities to a 6 *month* lead time in a matter of weeks, and even then, they wouldn't guarantee us parts- it was more like 6 months to get on the list to maybe get parts. Microcontroller code doesn't port nearly as easily as higher level code- you tend to have to use every last resource.

    This caused a good number of manufacturers to biased against Atmel- they definitely have their good points, but if you can't get them, they're useless. Unless you're a really big company, it is hard to get continuity of supply agreements. I know that even now (working for a really big company) I hesitate to specify Atmel micros.

  3. Tants by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A couple of years ago we had huge problems getting tantalum capacitors, in any package (surf or through-hole). Lead times went from weeks to months. Like others have said, it fluctuates. What was hard to find one day becomes no big deal months later. It was, of course, toughest when the industry was at its peak -- more product being built means fewer parts available.