Fabbing older chips is not a particularly fruitful business for a startup, and the established players have their hands full. Some face water shortages. Others have suffered major factory fires. And all would need several months at a minimum in order to bring on more capacity.
Part of the problem is that when the supply chain is long and fragile, a perturbation anywhere affects customers everywhere. Kulicke & Soffa has said that they're having trouble getting chips for their machines. That's problematic because they are a semiconductor equipment manufacturer.
The result of shortage is that lead times get longer (not unlike how packets queue for a lossy channel), incentivizing chip customers to order more than they need. This, in turn, further constrains the market.
The trailing edge lithography scanners don't get up to the 180 tons that an ASML EUV machine might weigh, but they're still large and you can't exactly get them with Amazon Prime two-day installation.
Acer and AMD said the shortages would ease this year, but TSMC says they will continue to next year and Intel said yesterday that they think it will take a couple of years.
Part of the problem is that when the supply chain is long and fragile, a perturbation anywhere affects customers everywhere. Kulicke & Soffa has said that they're having trouble getting chips for their machines. That's problematic because they are a semiconductor equipment manufacturer.
The result of shortage is that lead times get longer (not unlike how packets queue for a lossy channel), incentivizing chip customers to order more than they need. This, in turn, further constrains the market.
The trailing edge lithography scanners don't get up to the 180 tons that an ASML EUV machine might weigh, but they're still large and you can't exactly get them with Amazon Prime two-day installation.
Acer and AMD said the shortages would ease this year, but TSMC says they will continue to next year and Intel said yesterday that they think it will take a couple of years.