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

So maybe we should build some factories elsewhere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Say Detroit. Some redundancy would be beneficial, don't you think?

I bet there's plenty of available buildings too.

DRAM shortage after 1998 Taiwan earthquake

[peter303]

Taiwan manufactured some crucial part of DRAM then. So when factories closed for four months after a large 1998 quake, DRAM prices actually increased the following two years.

Re:Need to find old manufacturing consultant

[jd2112]

And he will point out that the cost savings from the past ten years of Just In Time offset any losses due to the situation in Japan and other catastrophies many times over.