Explained: How the tech world is tackling the chip shortage – The Indian Express

The chip shortage keeps dragging on. The situation is so bad that now Black Friday, the busiest shopping season of the year, is likely to be impacted with everything from gaming consoles to the new iPhones expected to be hard to come by.

With experts predicting the situation could improve by the middle of next year when more supplies are expected to become available, everyone seems to be asking what led to this major supply chain disruption in the first place and why it’s taking so long to fix.

Why is there a semiconductor shortage?

The global semiconductor shortage has affected many industries for more than a year and because of that, they are either forced to pay more for products or being asked to wait a little more. The shortage has affected smartphones, personal computers, game consoles, automobiles, and medical devices.

In October, Apple said it lost $6 billion to chip shortage in the last quarter and expects an even greater loss from supply chain issues in the December quarter. Japanese gaming giant Nintendo revised sales forecast for the fiscal year “due to the effects of the global semiconductor shortage”. Nintendo said “there has not been a major improvement in the situation” since the beginning of the fiscal year. Sony too expects to make fewer PS5s, a console that’s already in short supply since it launched back in November last year.

Chips or processors power every possible product on the market from high-end cars to washing machines. As Dr. Abhisek Dixit, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology – Delhi, explained, “The consumption of integrated circuits in products is ever increasing and a large manufacturing sector for these kinds of integrated circuits are a part of the supply chain.”

During the pandemic, manufacturing came to a standstill impacting the supply chains of products that need one or more of these. As the automotive sector almost shut down last year, chip makers shifted capacity to cater to increased demand for electronics items such as cell phones and laptops. Since orders for advanced chips are placed well in advance, manufacturers have not yet been able to come back to pre-pandemic production schedules to cater to all sectors.

The automotive chips are of medium-level complexity, compared to the really small and extremely complicated ones on smartphones and personal computers. Building something this small, featuring billions of transistors is an expensive process.

Dixit explained that while chip design has not been affected, “chip fabrication or manufacturing line is really where the …….

Source: https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/how-the-tech-world-is-tacking-the-chip-shortage-7633696/