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Technology

Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains? 43

Posted by Cliff from the identifying-the-bottlenecks dept.
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?"
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Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains? More

Choke Points in Electronics Supply Chains?

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  • Hi, I'm a terrorist (Score:5, Funny)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @08:43AM (#4809237) Homepage
    Can anyone give me guidance on which factories I should blow up in south-east Asia in order to have the maximum impact upon the American economy?

    How do the editors pick which Ask Slashdot questions they post?
    • [flame on] This sort of topic has become so lame, people wanting /. readers to do their studies for them. Get off your fucking ass and do your own research, you *#)$*@# wanker! [flame off]

      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.

    • I am not sure but I think it involves a bunch of d20's and beer. Lots and Lots of beer.

  • If only... (Score:1, Troll)

    by darkov ( 261309 )
    ...there were a choke point in the supply of really boring "Ask Slahsdot" posts. They are here to entertain us, you know, not to inform some hapless poster...

    Oh, and FP
    • Seems pretty on-topic to me. You've got my support, unfortunately, I'm out of mod points this wk.

      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. :-)

      • Yeah, if you say anything even slightly negative you get modded a troll. Moderator's today are so humourless. People really should look at posting history before marking someone a troll, and it should be reserved for real idiots, not borderline cases, or anyone making a critisism.

        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.

  • read the news (Score:3, Insightful)

    by BigBir3d ( 454486 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @08:59AM (#4809278) Journal
    The biggest area of concern is shipping. Take a look at the effects the recent longshoremen strike on the West Coast of the US. Plants closed, or started laying off workers. And this was only after 10 or so days of not getting goods.

    "You can just send it by plane, or the East Coast." Not really a valid answer, because everyone else thought of it too.
    • During the strike my local walmart was unable to recieve a certain advertized dvd player and had to sub in an apex player at the price of the advertized unit.

      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)

    by Muad'Dave ( 255648 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @09:01AM (#4809285) Homepage
    Tantalum, which is used in high-grade capacitors. Last I heard, it was mined in Africa by essentially slave labor, and the tantalum fields are small and owned by a cartel.

  • ...Will never strike in the electronic supply chain.

    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! :)

  • It's right Here [allelectronics.com]
  • Wasn't there a problem about 10 years ago where one of the glue factories in the Far East (Korea, I think) stopped making glue--I think it was either an earthquake, fire, or strike. Anyway, the factory was one of the only suppliers of the glue to assemble IC packages ... this led to problems getting RAM, in particular, driving prices up.

    Nothing like doing no research and pretending to be helpful.

    • Resin.

      Last paragraph RAM section: [monitor.ca] (Can't find a better link quickly, sorry.)

      One more thing: RAM is a commodity, the price of which can fluctuate widely depending on market conditions. In the summer of 1993, a plant that manufactured plastic resin for encapsulating RAM chips (one of only a few in the world) was put out of com-mission by a fire. Within days, the price of RAM shot up from a low of (C)$45.00 per MB before the 'crisis' to more than (C)$100.00 per MB. The price soon subsided to around (C)$75.00 per MB and, over the past year, finally came back down to around (C)$50.00 per MB again. Now, some industry observers are warning of a new RAM shortage 'crisis' this fall and winter as users rush to add more system memory to run their Windows 95 upgrades. However, as of press time for this issue, RAM remained stable at about (C)$50.00 per MB in the Ottawa-and-area market.
    • On the 4th of July 1993, a Sumitomo plant in Japan suffered and explosion that destroyed its production facility for epoxy cresol, a resin that is the main ingredient in the black plastic used to package ICs. Sumitomo had absorbed its main competitor and produced about 60% of the worldwide supply.

      "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.

      -- SysKoll
  • A Wise man say, only fools buy RAM right after an earthquake in Taiwan. King.

  • It changes over time (Score:3, Funny)

    by MarkusQ ( 450076 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @10:48AM (#4809913) Journal

    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)

    by Matt_Bennett ( 79107 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2002 @11:08AM (#4810108) Homepage Journal
    Sole source parts are always a bad thing to have, but if they are the normal jellybean parts (resistors, capacitors, transistors, etc.) you can usually work around and find an adequate substitute in a reasonable amount of time. On the other hand programmable parts tend to have unique code- that can't easily (or quickly) be transferred from one part to another.

    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)

    by stevew ( 4845 )
    This sounds like someone just trying to start up another conspiracy theory. SHEESH! A one having been in the electronics industry for over 20 years...GET A LIFE!

  • Start with the Raw Materials (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Big earthquake in Kobe several years ago affected shipments of semiconductor molding compound out of nearby Osaka. This causes big problems for many semiconductor manufacturers as most of the world gets their compounds from here.
    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!
  • The Electronics Supply Chain chokes you!

  • Tants (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A couple of years ago we had huge problems getting tantalum capacitors, in any package (surf or through-hole). Lead times went from weeks to months. Like others have said, it fluctuates. What was hard to find one day becomes no big deal months later. It was, of course, toughest when the industry was at its peak -- more product being built means fewer parts available.
  • You do homework for Slashdot!
  • Give my IBM rep a call and ask him why it took so long to get the new IBM xSeries 345 servers in stock.
  • increase in prices some years ago. The interesting part of the whole story was that no one could ever confirm where this resin factory was, and at some point there was speculation that the factories and the fires were completely made up. It was, I think, a classic example of supply chain manipulation at a time when prices were plummeting. It's amazing what can be done when you put your mind to it. Was it Einstein that said "imagination is more powerful than knowledge".
  • 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.

    Call me a cynical old fool, but I find this HIGHLY suspicious, especially given the current geo-polical situation.
    • I agree. As "research" for graduate study this would be a waste of time. I would imagine that the CIA and the US Dept. Of State already know all of the details about this. They would know because this sort of data is so important to our GNP.

      Something stinks with this question.

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