✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10

thanks to AI demand, Lattice cannot make enough FPGAs to fulfill orders on iCE40's (and probably ECP5's) with less than a year of lead time. this is likely to cause supply chain issues for Glasgow revD

words cannot describe my contempt for this shit, and my disdain for anyone still pushing it

(there is no shortage or supply chain issues with the silicon itself. rather, the problem here is the resin used to make a part of the packaging. in theory it would be possible to just glue a die to the PCB and bond it out during assembly, in practice this would be prohibitively expensive as far as I know)

Show threadLynneMar 10
@whitequark Surely there are plenty of spare old foundries to make them? AI chips really need EUV these days.
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10

@lynne it's not about the silicon. the silicon is fine

it's about the little piece of printed circuit board that redistributes signals from the bond wires to the balls under the BGA

Show threadLynneMar 10
@whitequark *that's* the bottleneck?
I'd have thought that this would have been vertically integrated into the production.
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10
@lynne you would think so, but there's a worldwide shortage of the stuff now
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧
@lynne specifically of the epoxy resin, which is only manufactured in a few places in the world
Mar 10 at 8:01pmWeb