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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?"
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.