When the chips are down: Glipmse into the semiconductor chip shortage

The chip shortage keeps dragging on. The COVID-19 pandemic caused disruptions in supply chains and logistics which, coupled with a 13% increase in global demand for PCs owing to some countries’ shift to a stay-at-home economy, impacted the availability of key chips necessary for the manufacturing of a broad swathe of electronics. The pandemic’s impact on the manufacture of semiconductors in South Korea and Taiwan was cited as a cause for the shortage, with constrained supply impacting industries as broad as console gaming and the automotive industry.

The situation is so bad that now the busiest shopping seasons of the year, are likely to be impacted with everything from gaming consoles to the new iPhones expected to be hard to come by. We’ve probably sold more microcontrollers in the past year than the past decade, and the wait to receive some popular microcontrollers now stretches to more than a year and prices for the products have leaped 20-fold among traders that buy and sell chips. Demand for Microchip’s products is running more than 50% higher than it can supply.

With the situation predicted to improve by the middle of next year when more supplies are expected to become available, everyone seems to be asking what led to this major supply chain disruption in the first place, and why it’s taking so long to fix. The global semiconductor shortage has affected many industries for more than a year and because of that, they are either forced to pay more for products or…