Japanese Chip Shutdown Causing Shortages

An anonymous reader writes "Japan's natural disasters and nuclear crisis have already caused silicon wafer shortages that are rippling through the global supply chain of semiconductors for everything from your garden variety PC to the biggest Google server farm. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan have shut down 25 percent of the global semiconductor raw materials production, threatening to cause shortages and price hikes in everything from smartphones to supercomputers. Intel and Qualcomm are countering that they have stockpiles and alternative manufacturing plants that can pick up the slack, but dozens of other electronics makers require critical components only manufactured in Japan."

Comments

Re:Because This is Important

[Anonymous Coward]

Liz Taylor died this morning and you're posting this shit?

Have some priorities, man!

Re:Yep, thats big problem

[Anonymous Coward]

the game

damn you!

Need to find old manufacturing consultant

[chill]

Specifically, the one who pushed "Just In Time" for the manufacturer where I worked way back when.

Me: "But what about catastrophic incidents with a supplier or entire region?"

Consultant: "It doesn't happen like that. If one supplier goes down, we get from another. Entire sectors don't go down at once."

After 10 years I can now call him up and say "Ha! I told you so!"

Re:Need to find old manufacturing consultant

[geoskd]

many modern business methods have come out of there, including the Toyota system...

Is that the system where they just keep going without stopping?

The US comes out on top

[Dachannien]

See, this shows how the US has things figured out. If we have a catastrophic natural disaster in the US, we won't run into this problem, because we were smart enough to make sure that we don't manufacture anything here.

Re:Radio-Action?

[ShakaUVM]

>>>Hello, I'm no nuculear specialist or anything, so I want to know if there is any chance of PC parts with japanese components (capacitors and stuff) shipping with radioactive particles on them from now on.
>>I want all those extra FPS's...but i don't want my PC to be something to DIE for!

But... gamma particles are all the latest craze in overclocking! Why be lame with those commodity blue LED lights on your box when you could have the "real" soothing blue of Cherenkov radiation?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/Advanced_Test_Reactor.jpg (Hmm, actually looks like a lot of cases I've seen...)

Re:An opportunity...

[dgatwood]

Yeah, but for that short period of time, a bunch of manufacturers found themselves in a sticky situation.