[singlewind]

I am not fully persuaded there is shortage. People could not get what they want is more about price not availability. That because manufacturers made too many things customers don’t need. Base on Q4 IC companies report, most of product driven companies, like Intel and AMD sales less than last year. However OEM like TMSC actually produces more and had more revenue.

[analog31]

Naturally, price and availability are intertwined. In this industry, availability is easy to see, because the manufacturers keep track of inventories on their own shelves and at their distributors. And there are tools for researching substitute parts, such as Octopart.

Even if you can find a substitute, it can take engineering effort to accommodate it, such as board changes and testing. Oh, and the people who can do this, have all moved to software engineering jobs that pay more, or they retired during the pandemic.

My tiny side business just went through this. The chip that I need became unavailable, as did all reasonable substitutes, at any price. I had to re-design my board in order to accommodate a different chip. Fortunately my labor is cheap and available, but dumping a whole bunch of that kind of work on a commercial business, all at once, can be painful.

[gcr]

It hasn’t been possible to purchase a raspberry pi 4 from any seller listed on raapberrypi.com for months and counting now

[singlewind]

Current price of raspberry pi 4 is killing it as a product.

[SV_BubbleTime]

My man… I have 100 week lead times on some parts and they haven’t changed for roughly 100 weeks.

There is a chip shortage.

[lnsru]

Of course there is no shortage. You can buy all the parts from shady brokers at 10x price. My case it was 10x for PHY chip. ADCs were cheaper, only at 6-8x price.

Solution: buy another, obsolete PHY chip for only 2x price and strip ADCs for older products.

Just look at Mouser and Digikey, too many parts aren’t in stock and lead times with 1,5 years are ridiculous.

[gumby]

I think the supply shortage was not at the high end but the much larger volume & lower priced parts.

[maxerickson]

Yeah, stuff like voltage regulators and fets and whatnot.