I doubt the DIY audio community is the main priority here. But it might have some spinoff effects in terms of IC prices and availability.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/21/politics/semiconductor-shortages-biden-administration/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/21/politics/semiconductor-shortages-biden-administration/index.html
I doubt it will be about anything but their own chips at all. Intel currently outsources some things, so they're building this to do it themselves, not to lend the manufacturing space to others.
I wouldn't wait for any VFET's on my doorstep anytime soon.
I wouldn't wait for any VFET's on my doorstep anytime soon.
In that case, it might help those who are into DSPs or FPGAs. When Intel puts less load on independent foundries, they may have more capacity to make FPGAs and DSPs.
Good for Intel investing in manufacturing outside of silicon valley and asia. TI has been investing too mostly in Texas. the electronics industry is in sad shape with supply these days, TI has some parts, like a simple lm339 out in 2023 for delivery, its nuts I say. Imagine being a mfg that relies on that part, your mfg is shut down for all of 2022 because of a lm339. Someone wanting a vfet is royally screwed.
Reminds me when I worked a Motorola in the 80's and they introduced JIT, the girls on the assembly line would be reading news papers waiting for one or more parts to come in to finish an assembly build. When the part(s) came in it was OT for everyone, shifts, to get the orders out to meet billings targets.
Reminds me when I worked a Motorola in the 80's and they introduced JIT, the girls on the assembly line would be reading news papers waiting for one or more parts to come in to finish an assembly build. When the part(s) came in it was OT for everyone, shifts, to get the orders out to meet billings targets.
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Its going to be a processor fab, not a generic semiconductor fab. Intel make memory, CPUs and GPUs, completely different from "ordinary" semiconductor devices. Their roadmap is all about nanometre-scale FINFets, their successors, and multi chip stacking technologies. We're talking chips with 10 to 100 billion transistors on them currently. Don't think they're going to hold that operation up for a few audio transistors (they probably can't do those processes at all).
By comparison turning out a standard power transistor is almost stone-age technology.
Currently Agilex and some Stratix parts are fabricated at Intel (10 nm and 14 nm), everything else is TSMC. I don't think the 28 nm and 20 nm parts will ever be fabbed by Intel, so it might not have any effect, unfortunately. Hard for me to see Intel investing in older process nodes given their history and style.
What I don't understand is how we are going to move on from this shortage when it seems like no one wants to invest in additional capacity for garden variety 28-40nm+ nodes. The most affected parts right now appear to be on older processes.
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We won’t, anytime soon. I’m starting to read reports that the current semi crisis is what I originally thought: cut supply to drive up prices.
A certain big semi supplier, that should remain unnamed, started nothing less than auctioning chip batches, don’t ask me how I found out.
A lot of this is being driven by the fact that 80% of all chips are made in Taiwan and their future is not looking good. If the Chinese take them over and cut off the world wide chip supply they win. Most manufacturers could care less about the lower demand and profit devices until they have the domestic capacity to make them without slowing anything that is crucial to our security or ability to compete. We can live without vfets but not cpus and memory.
I don't think so. In fact, some of the most available parts seem to be from TSMC's advanced nodes. I don't think the geopolitical situation has much to do with not being able to source MCUs, DC-DC converters, etc. This is obviously a long term concern, but I don't think it's what's causing supply issues right now.