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Chip shortage to linger?

Many industries remain crippled due to the current chip shortage.

Humble components such as STM32 microcontrollers remain in short supply and have seen meteoric price rises that have bumped costs by as much as 1,000 percent or more.

Semiconductor companies are working hard to get new fabrication plants online so you'd expect that this might bring an end to the problems -- but perhaps it won't.

The problem is that most of the new production capacity will be focused on the newer 10nm to 5nm processes used for very large scale integrated circuits such as CPUs, GPUs and such -- whereas the real shortages are in the supply of older 45nm+ parts.

With CPUs, GPUs, RAM and other VLSI components based on newer technologies offering a far better return than the older stuff, capacity for producing those STM32 devices may remain in short supply for quite some time.

Although they have become the backbone of many appliances, cars, tools and other products, the STM32 family is still based on this older tech and few (if any) companies want to invest valuable capital in production capacity for "end of life" technologies.

The unit-price for these microcontrollers is usually so low that it requires vast production runs to turn any significant profit and that sees manufacturers perferring to turn their attentions to more valuable devices that have higher margins.

Of course the laws of supply and demand still apply so for the time being these chips are very much more expensive than they were but who wants to take the risk that, when production ramps up to meet supply, they'll be left making a very low-margin product when high-margin alternatives abound?

As I think I've mentioned in a previous column, this may very well open the door to a small but quite lucrative market for e-waste companies.

Although your average old PC, monitor or other discarded consumer electronics device is unlikely to have any of these (now) valuable STM32 chips in them, a great many other appliances do.

Odds are that that junked washing machine, coffee-maker, smart battery charger and a plethora of other "smart" devices being tossed in the e-waste could be worth at least a few dollars for its "brains" alone. A couple of minutes with a heat-gun and the valuable MCUs could be salvaged for resale and reuse.

Would this be a cost-effective operation for a full-blown business?

Probably not, here in New Zealand. However, I think that if I had some spare time on my hands and wanted to earn some pocket money, striking a deal with a local e-waste dealer for the rights to scrounge through their piles for those valuable chips might be a good earner.

Suck them off the circuit boards, package them up and pop them on eBay.

A day or so's work a week might net you a grand or two worth of silicon -- and that's nothing to sneeze at!

Damn... once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur :-)

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