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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."
...but dozens of other electronics makers require critical components only manufactured in Japan."
What could these critical components be really? Just want to know. With this datum, can someone convince me that Japan is manufacturing these components because it's cheaper than to manufacture them in the USA?
US based venture capitalists, step in and do something here. You will be handsomely rewarded.
Say Detroit. Some redundancy would be beneficial, don't you think?
I bet there's plenty of available buildings too.
Yes, human life is valuable and its the first priority, but Its the entire economy of the civilized world we are talking about here, so its a bit more important then you are eluding to.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Japan has been known to disaster-prone for how long exactly? And you don't have reliable alternate streams for your critical components? Cry me a fucking river - I'll sing you a sad song.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
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!"
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
This is /. not oxfam. What aspect of it do you think we are going to talk about?
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.
People trapped and dying.
Let's worry about how much our next next motherboard will cost.
Yeah, let's stop supporting them economically and chew on our nails instead;.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
>>>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...)
eluding to
alluding to
"ad" means "to" in Latin. "ex" means "from". You elude from something. You allude to it.
evade, escape, egress...
attack, admonish, advise...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Because not discussing the economic impact of a disaster on a technology website will totally help those people. Much in the same way that not discussing other, more trivial stories will cure cancer or address world hunger.
So far the only major tech companies really known to be affected are:
Sony's camera division which has halted its assembly lines due to the rolling blackouts, it is concidering shifting production to other facilities temporarily.
Toshiba's LSI plant is offline they hope to be back up and running in about 3 weeks, they are offline due to damaged equipment. They have switched to alternate facitiles for its small screen manufacturing and do not expect shortages.
Canon's domestic camera production is offline due to a shortage of on hand parts but hopes to be back up and running by the end of this week.
Nikon has 4 plants that are offline but they are for its precision equipment division its camera and consumer products plants are in Taiwan.
Panasonic has several plants that handle optical sensors and camera gear offline in northern Japan there is no major damage but say they are waiting on infrastructure repair before resuming production.
Renesas Electronics, has resumed operations at their biggest plant of the seven affected but another six are offline, 15 of their other plants in japan are still up and running and were not affected by the Tsunami.
Shin-Etsu Chemical, the silicon wafer manufacturer that everyone is talking about has 2 of their plants offline but are trying to boost production at other plants to make up for any shortfalls.
MANUFACTURED means MADE. This isn't a natural resource; if they can make it, so can we. The fact that you allowed yourself to become dependent on a sole source goes back to - wait for it - BAD PLANNING.
Remember how AMD got into the x86 biz? No? Go look it up.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Well, depending on the context, 'just-in-time' often is a good idea and does save money. Before shipping got reliable (and before http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research figured out the math in WW2 and beyond), you had to maintain a fairly large stockpile of input and output at every site involved in the entire chain from raw material harvesting all the way to the storefront. Gradually we've figured out how much of a supply each location really needs on hand, so we only keep that (plus maybe a few percent more as wiggle room), thus saving the cost of the extra storage space and employees. So for example, the storefront gets one truckload a week and puts most of that directly on the shelves, instead of getting four trucks at the start of every month and putting all that in a huge back room and then gradually moving it again onto shelves over the month. Plus, the shorter storage lengths are, of course, better for things that have expiration dates, like food that spoils, or high storage costs like food that needs to be refrigerated.
In the case to the quake/tsunami, being oldschool wouldn't have really been any better; stockpiles within japan would still have been damaged, and there would still be exactly the same supply problem once the stockpiles elsewhere were used up. (Or to reword it: the gap in the supply pipeline would still be the same size, even if the pipe was longer). Note that for this tech stuff, the stockpiles are also constrained on both ends: they can't be too small, because the shipment takes a long time to arrive from japan; but they can't be too large because the tech changes quickly, so having a large stockpile would mean starting your own production late, and then been stuck holding obsolete parts when it's time to start making the next new thing. (Or another reword: when the tech moves fast, any stockpile's value depreciates very quickly).
Remember how AMD got into the x86 biz? No? Go look it up.
Excellent suggestion, link for anyone interested.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amd#Processor_market_history
Relevant quote for those not interested. Seems like good planning on IBMs part.
IBM wanted to use the Intel 8088 in its IBM PC, but IBM's policy at the time was to require at least two sources for its chips.
You are entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
it's like the difference between having unbuffered video stream and a buffered video stream on your youtube video.
if its unbuffered, you might get interruptions and hiccups in delivery, which destroy the experience.
if you have buffering, it costs more resources, more memory, more code, etc, but you are guaranteed less interruption.
now we are talking about big industries instead of a video on youtube, so people feel the impact harder, and if it is the food pipleine, people will start rioting in the street.
many oil producers keep strategic reserves on hand, am i right? its like inventory, its wasteful but they do it to smooth out the bumps in the road.