Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains? 43
madax asks: "Well..yeah..I am doing some graduate level research in identifying choke points in the electronics supply chain, trying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry, critical processes owned by maybe a select few players and potential information distortion mechanisms that could be used by a few select players in the supply chain to disrupt the entire industry. Can anyone help me by pointing to interesting examples from your experience?"
Hi, I'm a terrorist (Score:5, Funny)
How do the editors pick which Ask Slashdot questions they post?
Re:Hi, I'm too lazy to do my own research! (Score:1, Offtopic)
Alternate question: Can anyone give me guidance on which schools graduate lazy shits like this? I can sell the list to people who want to pick up a few degrees who don't/can't do real coursework.
How the editors pick posts. (Score:1)
If only... (Score:1, Troll)
Oh, and FP
Re:Troll??? (Score:2)
Perhaps the moderator didn't realize that your response was to the meta-question posed by the original question ... ie: why should ./ readers do lazy students' work for them. :-)
Re:Troll??? (Score:2)
I think it is a valid point, though. The editors should be looking for questions that prevoke a lively debate. That's what slashdot is for - hundreds of opiniated nerds who think they know best fighting it out - not, as you say, to help them get their homework done. They should be asking questions that in essence, have no answers, not something you could get an answer on whith some applied googling. I think as editors they are missing the point. But even just from a nerdy point of view, who could find a question like this interesting?
Oh well. Thanks for the support anyways.
Re:Memory. (Score:4, Insightful)
Which "few years ago"? This happens every couple of years in the memory industry, in a pattern that has been in place for a quarter century:
Re:Memory. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Memory. (Score:2)
And in Jan. 1995, the Kobe earthquake in Japan took out the factory that makes the black plastic used to encase the memory chips, driving prices up. It's all happened before!
Re:Memory. (Score:1)
read the news (Score:3, Insightful)
"You can just send it by plane, or the East Coast." Not really a valid answer, because everyone else thought of it too.
Re:read the news (Score:1)
You can also say the trucking industry is another choke point in the shipping lanes, and FUEL PRICES! Raise the fuel prices enough and the truckers are going to strike like they did laste year in europe (i think).
You can also say electric power would royaly screw everything up.. if power is out across the nation (only a few hundred suicide terrorists needed) production, sale and shipping will all be halted for the next 12 years while power co's try to rebuild and repower industry. (if that happens we will probably die before they get power stations rebuilt unless the europe-asia gives us a hand rebuilding power plants (basic machined parts)
DRACO-
Check out... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Check out... (Score:2)
Re:Check out... (Score:1)
Terror! Doom! Disaster! (Score:2, Funny)
The way I see it, its all about business. To inacurately quote star wars, "The tighter your grasp, the more planets will slip between your fingers". How it relates to this is that if one or two key players try to control the crucial supply, there will be always several smaller guys who will think "hey, i can do it better". And they will do their own thing, fscking up the "overly powerful players".
Just like when a Dark Operating System dominated the desktops, a small but elite operating system began to strike from hidden bases, slowly but surely scoring greater and greater victories against the Dominant Overlord of Operating Systems...The battle continues!
Off track, sorry, right, what i mean is, there's a lot of keen poor people out there who dont like being poor. Those keen folk keep their eyes peeled out for an opurtunity to stop being poor. Key points, weak links in supply chains, areas with little competition are factors which attract new players like lattes attract programers.
Should an established player in a supply chain attempt something shift and/or underhanded, those keen little guys will jump right in to try to get a piece of the apple pie. (refer starwars example above hahha)
Once again, sorry for a long-ass, overdrawn, poorly spelt post but I hope at least some part of it makes sense!
I found the choke in electronics supply chain (Score:2, Funny)
A horse is a horse... (Score:2)
Nothing like doing no research and pretending to be helpful.
Re:A horse is a horse... (Score:2)
Last paragraph RAM section: [monitor.ca] (Can't find a better link quickly, sorry.)
That was Sumitomo, and epoxy resin, not glue (Score:2)
"Experts" said it would take 3 years to resume a production line. The fact is that it's pretty hard to manufacture, fine-tune, characterize and ship such a very pure compound. As a result, most IC companies stated reserving their resin allocation to their most profitable IC lines. It became precarious to purchase low-cost TTL circuits.
Guess what? Experts were wrong, as usual! Sumitomo had a new line back in production after a few months. Worldwide shortage was averted. Radio Shack kept selling these 74xx TTLs. Wew.
Lesson learned but never applied: Never depend on a producer that manufactures most of the worldwide supply of anything in only one location.
Wise man say (Score:2)
It changes over time (Score:3, Funny)
trying to identify critical materials used in the electronics industry,
What is critical changes over time. Yesterday's abundant resource can become tomorow's rate-limiting commodity.
For example, at the moment the industry seems to be stalled fighting over access to the limited world supply of something called "customers".
-- MarkusQ
Sole source parts and microcontrollers (Score:4, Interesting)
A case in point from my own experience about 2.5 years ago- flash memory had a huge upswing in demand- I believe it was from cell-phones. It was so lucrative, that Atmel switched its fabs over to producing lots of flash memory, and putting us microcontroller users on allocation- we went from a 6 week lead time on production quantities to a 6 *month* lead time in a matter of weeks, and even then, they wouldn't guarantee us parts- it was more like 6 months to get on the list to maybe get parts. Microcontroller code doesn't port nearly as easily as higher level code- you tend to have to use every last resource.
This caused a good number of manufacturers to biased against Atmel- they definitely have their good points, but if you can't get them, they're useless. Unless you're a really big company, it is hard to get continuity of supply agreements. I know that even now (working for a really big company) I hesitate to specify Atmel micros.
Witch hunt (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Good God... (Score:2)
Lieutenants talk Strategy but Generals talk logistics.
Start with the Raw Materials (Score:1, Informative)
A couple of years back during the telecom boom (ahh those were the days...) Beryillium Copper Alloy used in semiconductor leadframes became a really scarce commodity.
Loudspeaker prices can fluctuate wildly depending on the supply of cobalt and other rare-earths used in making magnets. The key supply points are volatile African nations where revolution affects production.
Follow the raw materials!
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
Tants (Score:1, Interesting)
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
Talk to IBM.. (Score:1)
Fires in 2 IC resin factories caused a sharp (Score:1)
Suspious (Score:2)
Call me a cynical old fool, but I find this HIGHLY suspicious, especially given the current geo-polical situation.
Re:Suspious (Score:2)
Something stinks with this question.