The semiconductor industry presents unusual challenges to supply-chain management, which make it harder to predict when shortages will hit. The core problem is time. It takes months for an individual chip to make it from a wafer being sliced from a silicon ingot to being packed into a tube or mounted on a reel ready to be shipped to an assembly plant. The customers' orders will be shifting at a different rate, creating spikes and slumps in demand to which chipmakers cannot easily react. In the wake of the dot-com slump some suppliers diverted unfinished wafers to nitrogen storage at a point in manufacture where the chips onboard would not degrade before being returned to the fab to be finished. They have even fewer options when faced with a peak in demand: whatever is ordered cannot turn up in less than three months even with dedicated production.
展开▼
