Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
SEPTEMBER 2021 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 49 and smaller. And it doesn't matter whether it's passives or chips. Say you're a chip manufacturer and you've got your wafer level chip scale packages, which is just the silicon with some bumps on it, tiny little thing, or you can have a big old SOIC that requires a lead frame, plastic, glues, all these other materials. Which one is it going to make sense to build when you're opening your ca- pacity back up again? If you don't need that big old package, go for the smaller parts. Johnson: Great advice. Now, who oversees this? You're promoting the idea that alternatives are necessary in the bill of materials to ensure re- siliency and steady production; I get this. But who puts this resilient BOM together? Benson: In the prototype world, it's oen up to the design engineers themselves. In the vol- ume manufacturing world, especially with the larger organizations, it is more likely to be sup- ply chain folks. And those supply chain folks are supposed to be talking with our supply chain folks to make sure there are alternates and that they do buy ahead. What oen hap- pens is suddenly these people who were used to placing a couple of orders here and there, a couple of emails back and forth, they might have one or two BOM issues to deal with, sud- denly now they've got hundreds of BOM issues to deal with. ey've got suppliers that are call- ing them up constantly saying, "is, this, and this is out of stock." Now, their workloads have gone through the roof. It just compounds the problem because it requires a lot of time and effort, and the peo- ple who do that work are just being hammered with additional workload. We see it ourselves here. We've had to staff up in our purchasing department with our buyers and everything because their workload has just gone absolute- ly crazy. Johnson: is sounds unsustainable; back to the whole idea that this feels like it's a com- modities market. is is a situation screaming for a live update tool. Benson: Some people have tried. And I'm not going to name any names, but if you look at the live update tools or the things that are close to live update tools, they're not built for this ei- ther. Nobody's inventory is even up to date. You go to the online tool, and it says they've got 50,000 of these. Awesome. I need 20,000, so let me place an order. "Oh, no, sorry. We sold all those yesterday." Or they sold all those an hour ago or 10 minutes ago. A real-time tool that went from the manufacturer to the dis- tributor, to us, to the engineer, to the purchas- ing folks at the OEM company would be really nice, but yesterday's definition of "real time" is not good enough right now. Johnson: And of course, with that kind of workload in procurement, some of that will get pushed back onto the engineers. e bill of materials, from a designer perspective, is oner- ous. In their eyes, filling out an Excel spread- sheet with 16-character part number strings for all 250 components—this is not what an en- gineer wants to do. It looks like it's going to get even worse because there isn't enough band- width on the teams to keep all the bills of mate- rial up to date as quickly as the market is chang- ing. at puts a lot of burden on the assembler. Benson: Here's where this becomes cyclical. When supply is generous and manufactur- ers must be more creative, the original com- ponent manufacturers must be more creative to get people to buy their parts, so they frac- tionalize their product lines: "We've got a 5%, we've got a 10% and a 20%. How about a 2.5%? How about a 2% or 2.7%? How about a 2.85%? ey fractionalize it because they've got to do something to stand out and to talk directly to people who need something exact. e micro- controller—the silicon people—do the same thing. I know one particular chip that you can buy with 256 bytes, 512 bytes, 16K, 32K, 64K,