Can some one in semi conductor industry explain which chips there is a shortage of and what kind of industrial capacity needs to come online to create supply?
I'm familiar with CPU / GPUs (i.e. very expensive equipment, facilities, etc.), but curious if most chips will do with using cheaper and older generation as sufficient. For example power MOSFETs, microcontrollers, etc.
"Wafers", i.e. the capacity of fabs to process silicon into chips. This capacity is more or less fixed at time of fab construction; if you want to expand, you need to buy more wafer processing machines from ASML. There is a queue for these as well.
The nastier problem is that most of the microcontrollers are probably on older wafer processes (e.g. 65nm), and nobody wants to build a new old line.
So it's up to the part suppliers to rework the design for e.g. 22nm if space becomes available on newer lines.
Analog subsystems will require rework from scratch; digital can usually keep the same HDL, and its associated test suite, but changing to much smaller standard cells completely changes the timing properties. So all the timing closure and layout work needs to be re-done. Budget about 50% of the original cost, approximately.
Digital as well. Even if the overall design is similar, layout is dependent on the node size. Plus, the masks have to be remade at a not insubstantial cost.
All positions can be challenging now, to the point it's incorrect to call it chip shortages. There are shortages of passives, FETs, diodes, connectors, ferrite cores, cables and so on. It's not a technology issue. Welcome to post-globalism!
I'm familiar with CPU / GPUs (i.e. very expensive equipment, facilities, etc.), but curious if most chips will do with using cheaper and older generation as sufficient. For example power MOSFETs, microcontrollers, etc.