High tech electronics can be quite sensitive to small contaminants in manufacturing equipment. A plant making HDDs accidentally lubricated some of the machinery with silicone which turned out to be very bad. This silicone got into the disks and as the head passed over the disk it got hot enough to decompose the silicone oil into silica. So effectively, the hard drive disk got covered in sand and caused the hard drives to fail much faster.
The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped.
I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started shorting out the electronics.
Reminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate EVERYTHING from X at Y. Right down to the exact brand / line / formulation of the paint on (say) the walls of the lobby, the type of toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.
> The Copy Exactly! methodology focuses on matching the manufacturing site to the development site. Matching occurs at all levels for physical inputs and statistically-matched responses (outputs). This process enables continuous matching over time by using coordinated changes, audits, process control systems, and joint Fab management structures
Back in the days of "classic" ASP pages, the usual model at the shop I worked in was that whenever we needed to add a page to the site we would copy a working page and then modify it. Sure it duplicated a lot of common code, but it wasn't without its advantages. You could be pretty certain that your page would not break anything else, and that later changes to a page would also be self-contained. It did suck when a change needed to be made to many pages, but if you knew about cygwin and grep, sed, and awk, those could often be automated.
See: Target's botched move into Canada. They basically copied everything they did in the US. This was compounded by an optimistic purchase of another company's locations to expand into. They bombed the project's runway on that and couldn't afford to keep it going while they sorted out all the problems resulting from Canada revealing all the flaws in their US systems.
As a Canadian whose partner was initially very excited about the Target launch, what killed it for her/us was primarily the logistics issues— you'd go into the store and like 20% of the shelves would be empty including everything that was supposed to be on markdown, and even some of the stuff that was there wouldn't scan properly at the till.
But apart from that, I think we got the impression that there were some market positioning issues too. Like, in the US, Wal-Mart has a reputation for being the absolute cheapest, so Target being the "step up" option is a pretty reasonable place to be. Whereas in Canada, Wal-Mart was already occupying that step-up space (relative to discount department stores like Giant Tiger and the old Zellers locations that Target Canada bought up), and those overseeing the Target push hadn't really committed on whether they wanted to fight Wal-Mart directly for that space, or try to go a level further up and take on the "nice" department stores like the Bay and Sears.
Neither option was great, given that Wal-Mart was well-entrenched and the nice department stores having been dying for decades anyway. But not choosing a path at all is often worse than either of two bad options might have been if they'd at least been fully committed-to.
That wiki article makes it sound like they did change something compared to the US stores; prices went up. Canadian customers knew that from previously crossing the border to US Target stores and subsequently stopped going pretty much immediately after launch.
I believe part of the reason is they completely changed their enterprise resource planning & supply chain software. There were a LOT of changes, and yet not enough - not accounting for Canadian price sensitivity and the distances/warehousing difference.
This is a fascinating read I bookmarked at the time :)
I believe (but could be wrong) Home Depot did essentially the same thing - used Canadian market as test bed for SAP, except they already had an established stable presence here.
That general philosophy seems to be intact. A very recent example: a large machine at their Hillsboro research facility was dismantled and sent to production in Ireland, with the same model with a very slight upgrade shipped in to replace it at the R&D location.
I was watching a video about the gold coating on the JWST primary mirror segments and noticed a conspicuously placed sign warning employees not to bring anything containing silicone into the facility.[1] I had no idea it was such a problem contaminant! I wonder if they have issues with personnel using silicone based personal products at home.
Siloxanes are serious contaminates in several industrial processes. Another big one is powder coating "paint". It can be bad even if only comes from a personal care product used by an employee at home.
And you called out their near-infinite ability to be spread around.
It's a common process used to coat all sorts of objects. But you don't buy "powder coating paint" and use it yourself, it is done in purpose built facilities.
Silicone oil is one of the most stubborn contaminants I have ever encountered. I use trisodium phosphate to clean it up, and even then it sometimes persists. Try pouring epoxy over wood that has been polished with Pledge, and you'll see what I mean.
Not a clean room, but reminds me when I was working in a partner's small datacenter and found an electrician in there using a chop saw on metal conduit.
In scientific terms - some chemical (used in the production) was supposed to be 99.999999% pure...but was not, and the offending impurity(ies) was (in terms of consequences for the uber-delicate production processes) Profoundly Unhelpful.
In poetic terms - a hundred thousand tiny demons got loose in the plant, and each and every one of them will need to be laboriously exorcised, before production can resume.
Exactly. Pretty poor news article not addressing this. At least they could have added "The manufacturer declined to comment on how the contamination occured" if that's the case.
Poor manufacturing process? (Of course poor is relative in today's silicon) Sabotage? Earthquake? (They have them all the time) Radiation from Fukushima? (Maybe a bit late 10 years after)
6.5 million in equivalent 1-terabyte units (note that NAND chips tend to be 64-512GB, the unit is just to illustrate approximate loss). However, I'm reading it beyond the 6.5 exabytes since that the WD press release (or any Kioxia statement) did not state that the production has been resumed, so I'm assuming it's actually a downtime and not just bad chips.
Everything that uses NAND flash, which ranges from computers to phones to TVs. WD and Kioxia supply chips to the commodity market, not just for their own branded products.
For example 40% of "Brand X" SSD drives might have WD chips, 40% Toshiba chips, and 20% Samsung chips so the manufacturer can get a better price and/or diversify supply. If WD can only supply 25% next quarter orders to Toshiba and Samsung will increase. That will naturally push prices up to some degree.
> said they’re working to get the plants in Yokkaichi and Kitakami back to normal operations as quickly as possible.
> Kioxia said its newer and more lucrative type of 3D flash was the product line impacted, and “the company does not anticipate that shipment of its conventional 2D NAND flash memory will be affected.”
What a happy coincidence. Just as prices of flash memory have stabilized.
Manufacturers of commodity parts like storage or LCD panels are infamous for price fixing and gouging. All the disasters are great excuse for unjustified price hikes.
I remember how a decade ago I was building my PC and HDD prices were painful.
With all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like they make them much faster anymore. So maybe the chip shortage is not as big problem as rumored?
Someone crashed my car recently. I had to buy another one (the other was impossible to repair).
I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla was literally double the price.
The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars, the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have been literally selling their dashboards to richer people, because they now are crazy expensive.
Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the government to give them money.
Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip shortage made trucks get crazy expensive.
The government also was going to switch the machines used for voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage.
The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is literally disrupting production, changing products, changing people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the leader of 250 million people is chosen!
The commercial heavy vehicle market is wildly different from consumer automobiles.
As far as parts availability, I see just as many trucks on the road as ever. If it were widespread that it took months to fix trucks, there would be a huge impact. There’s not.
Do you have actual proof of what you’re talking about?
It's not rumoured, it's thousands of articles that explain how this is a big deal and how many industries have had to slow down because of it. Chips are used in everything, your personal laptop is really irrelevant in the equation.
Indeed a laptop built in 2014 is unaffected by a chip shortage in 2020-22.
Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement.
Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a replacement if your router just got fried by lightning.
And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage going on.
The short explanation is that phone and computer chips are incompatible with cars (except in Tesla cars where they do use some, and even then Tesla cars still use chips that are literally have no comparison with computer chips).
The long explanation is that the "node" of the process used in phones and computers are different from those used in cars. Most computers can tolerate errors and correct them a bit later, but in cars that scenario can result to injury or even death. Car chips are built to totally different standards, and to borrow a terminology in software, written in assembly and not C. You cannot just reuse the processes intended for computer chips and apply them in cars, you need to manually check that everything still works out.
There are multiple shortages going on. For leading edge chips going into phones and GPU's maybe we wait for our game console or new phone a few months. But there are also shortages for automotive sensors, microcontrollers, power delivery controllers. Not buying a new phone isn't going to solve the IC shortage for cars or white goods.
I used to think that about my 2011 laptop as just looking at the CPU speeds were not really much faster. however, CPU is only a part of the system. GPU/RAM/SSD/etc have seen several generational leaps ahead and all add up to an improved experience. Also, even though the CPU speeds aren't much faster, the transistors in the chips are drastically changing. So some bits of code run faster because now they are on the chip.
Just as an aside, a CPU from 2022 will generally be much faster and efficient than one from 2014, even if the clock speed is similar, due to architecture improvements.
The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped.
I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started shorting out the electronics.