✧✦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 threadSvenMar 10
@lynne @whitequark funnily enough apparently one of the major producers of this stuff is a company primarily making sauces and other seasoning, which at some point branched out into making packaging materials as a side thing...
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Mar 10
@HeNeArXn @lynne oh like Ball jars?
Show threadSvenMar 10
@whitequark @lynne seems more resins and such, branching out from the chemistry they had developed for food science. This company: https://www.ajinomoto.com
Show threadChip
@HeNeArXn @whitequark @lynne Oh hah, yeah I have some of their Hondashi.
Mar 11 at 5:02amWeb