車用晶片缺貨

Debby Wu, Gabrielle Coppola, and Keith Naughton, A Year of Poor Planning Led to Carmakers’ Massive Chip Shortage, Bloomberg, 2021/1/19.

Near-sighted planning, supply-chain complexities and a tradition of keeping inventories low caused the semiconductor shortage that is now forcing carmakers to idle production lines and straining their relationship with chip manufacturers.

Seeds of the imbroglio were sown almost a year ago as the virus outbreak led to plunging car demand, prompting auto-chip companies to slash orders. But when they wanted to increase supply toward the end of 2020, they struggled to secure capacity at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and other contract chipmakers that were busy servicing a boom in demand for gadgets that help housebound consumers stay connected, according to people familiar with the situation.

While publicly assuring the problem is solvable, in private the parties are pointing fingers. Chipmakers say car companies’ preference for low inventories hurt their planning, while auto and part manufacturers say the supply chain is thrown into disarray as semiconductor makers drag their feet. Automakers also contend chipmakers are prioritizing consumer electronics because those devices provide the bulk of their sales and profits. Chipmakers deny they are playing favorites....

Because of carmakers’ “just-in-time” manufacturing model, their suppliers worried about quick inventory buildups and canceled orders originally planned for foundries in the first half of 2020, the people said. At the same time, foundries began seeing a surge in demand for gadget chips after Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Chinese brands prepped an avalanche of 5G devices including the iPhone 12, which require as much as 40% more silicon content as 4G handsets....

“There are more chips, more varieties of chips. It’s not one batch of chips that went bad and they’re struggling with recovering that one chip,” said Hough at Elm Analytics. “The ecosystem upstream of the OEMs stopped purchasing the chips they used in production as the manufacturing went down.” Another bottleneck lies with smaller automotive-chip designers which supply critical chips to the whole industry and depend entirely on foundries. They often lack bargaining power to secure timely production because of their modest sizes.

張建中，車用晶片大缺貨 工研院：產業特性與疫情是主因，中央社，2021/01/27  

新車銷量一年不到1億輛，數量遠少於智慧手機一年出貨10億支規模，且需求分散，呈少量多樣。范哲豪說，過去車廠的產量是汽車生產最大的瓶頸，因晶片缺貨影響汽車生產的情況相當罕見。

范哲豪表示，過去車廠較少規定晶片交期，因一輛車壽命動輒1、20年，車廠更重視晶片生命週期要長，與高可靠度，產品認證嚴格，也造成可選擇性少、更換不易的市場特性。

只是疫情打亂許多產業生產布局，消費與通訊市場先復甦，相關晶片廠都已搶訂晶圓代工產能，范哲豪說，晶圓代工廠去年下半年接單已趨於滿載。

車市去年因疫情影響，市況不佳，相關晶片庫存水位低，且復甦時間較晚，車用晶片又主要採用8吋成熟製程生產，范哲豪表示，成熟製程是這波產能最缺的部分，才會造成這次車用晶片嚴重缺貨的情況。

楊智家，ADI 執行長：車用晶片供應鏈未斷　短缺苦果車廠自找的，DigiTimes，2021-02-18

後疫情時代全球汽車產業遭逢車用晶片供應短缺問題，至今尚未解，對此美國類比IC大廠Analog Devices(ADI)執行長Vincent Roche表示，全球汽車製造商所面臨半導體供貨短缺衝擊問題，是許多汽車製造商自己造成的結果。供應鏈並沒有斷，只是在某些地方處理不當。

根據彭博(Bloomberg)報導，Roche指出，ADI正在努力滿足汽車客戶需求，但這個問題是根源自車廠端。不久前這些車廠才要求ADI退貨並取消積壓訂單(backlog)。儘管總體供應緊俏，ADI仍在晶片產業可能創造創紀錄成長的2021年，持續滿足訂單需求。

Roche表示從頭到尾，晶片從製造、封裝到測試需要花上長達15周時間，這與汽車製造商通常管理其供應鏈、所持庫存水位很少且預期供應商能夠及時滿足其訂單需求的模式完全不相同。