CompuServe Messages

Ernest, I work as a Test Engineer at a semiconductor manufacturer here in Silicon Valley. A plant in Japan that produced 50-60% of the word's supply of a resin used in most plastic IC packages blew up. My company (as I'm sure all semiconductor companies) has investigated the short and long term effect of this. The resin company has stockpiles that should last them through August-September, and most assembly houses have a one or two month supply themselves. This should mean that even with no change in the supply situation, reserves are good through at least November. There used to be a couple of US suppliers of this resin, but they dropped out of the market in the '80s. There are some other suppliers that should be able to take up some of the slack, and the original company is of course embarking on a crash course to rebuild their capacity. Additionally, there are several other resins on the market which can possibly be substituted for this one. These are being investigated at this very moment, I can assure you. There are other packaging alternatives to plastic, as well; these may add up to a few dollars to the actual cost to build the IC, but no where near the amount of increase you'll see on the retail market. The sad thing about this is how the market responds to any glitch in the supply situation. When the US gov't. was *thinking* about the possiblitity of increasing tariffs on Korean imports (5-10% of the market), distributors saw their chance to increase prices by nearly 100%. Two weeks later, they were back at their former prices. Here we are seeing the same thing happen again. Just as in the oil market, any perceived restriction in the supply is an opportunity for distributors (and retailers) to gouge the market. They raise their prices long before any supplier's price increases may hit them, and sell existing stock at the higher price. Locally, it is interesting to see that 9-bit SIMMS (those used in clones) have nearly doubled in price, whereas 8-bit SIMMS haven't changed much at all. Looks like this will have the biggest impact on the clone market, what with the new RAM-hungry OS's just coming out. ;-> // \X/ Amiga -Steve ——> On AutoPilot from Silicon Valley