This explains the shortage in very fast chips, but why do cars etc. have a chip shortage? Cant they use slower chips with fewer transistors that hopefully can be manufactured more easily by more companies?
Cars already use larger slower lithography sizes, which are more resilient to temperature changes, but also can be lower margin profit, since they take up more space on a standard silicon wafer. Older fabs, when spun down, may not just sit there, and may have their hardware cannibalized or at least the space repurposed for something profitable. So the old machines usually can’t just be turned on. There’s also a people-problem where that specific equipment may be understood by a select group of people and they may not be available.
There are also problems surrounding qualifications of parts and the supply chain restrictions that suppliers are held to by manufactures. So, trying to replace even just one part on a design that is locked down can be quite painful for a company. We are having many types of parts shortages at this time though, which exacerbates that experience.
Even so, a much “slower part” usually won’t have the same feature set, and may not have the same memory peripherals pinned out, requiring further qualification. Hardware changes of that level are usually done 2-3 years in advance for all of the paperwork and qualification steps. You’d have to build today-cars with standardized qualified parts from years ago. An outrageous example might be trying to stick a cassette-tape head-unit in your latest 2022 car.
