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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?"
Can anyone give me guidance on which factories I should blow up in south-east Asia in order to have the maximum impact upon the American economy?
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Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The biggest area of concern is shipping. Take a look at the effects the recent longshoremen strike on the West Coast of the US. Plants closed, or started laying off workers. And this was only after 10 or so days of not getting goods.
"You can just send it by plane, or the East Coast." Not really a valid answer, because everyone else thought of it too.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Which "few years ago"? This happens every couple of years in the memory industry, in a pattern that has been in place for a quarter century:
- New expensive memory technology is invented.
- Companies pour millions (today, billions) of dollars into chip fabs for the new technology.
- Memory prices rise to pay for the fabs, until...
- All the fabs go online, there's a huge glut of memory, and prices plummet.
The only thing that's new are the newbies who believe that the cycle they're in is the only cycletrying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry,
What is critical changes over time. Yesterday's abundant resource can become tomorow's rate-limiting commodity.
For example, at the moment the industry seems to be stalled fighting over access to the limited world supply of something called "customers".
-- MarkusQ
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.