Semiconductor Consulting LLC

Shortage! Shortage! Read All About It!

Electronics supply chains are reeling from a seemingly unending onslaught of Black Swan events: a global pandemic, extreme weather events, chemical contaminations, energy instability, and concentrated supply of rare earthmaterials.

Supply chain stakeholders must expand their knowledge base beyond price, availability, and quality to include the new domains of geo political risk, disaster continuity planning, and the art (not science) of securing predictable supply during persistent shortages in an allocated market.

This new supply chain paradigm requires experience finding the delicate balance between customer and supplier that delivers mutual success.

Need an advisor?

I help your technical sourcing team develop differentiated relationships with critical component suppliers.

I help your product definition team survey and identify vendor roadmap misalignment while creating mitigation plans for longterm sourcing.

I help your sales engineering team research targeted market trends, discover qualified growth prospects, and execute a go-to-market strategy.

I specialize in memory and storage.

DRAM

System memory generally utilizes some form of DRAM.

For consumer applications, this will consist of interfaces like LPDDR5, LPDDR4x, or DDR4. For datacenter and enterprise applications, interfaces like DDR5 and DDR4 are dominant. High performance applications like graphics, networking, and supercomputing may utilize high bandwidth memory, also known as HBM.

DRAM packaging is available in solder down BGA components, removable modules like DIMMs, and even as SiP or die form for integration inside another IC.

DRAM memory may look and feel like a commodity, but manufacturing evolves at an extreme pace and your design may not be able to adapt without a rigorous qualification schedule.

NAND

System storage for frequently accessed data is built on NAND flash.

High performance SSD's built with NAND are available in all kinds of interfaces and form factors. Some popular interfaces for datacenter, enterprise, and even PC applications include NVME, SATA, and SAS. Form factors are even more diverse, including M.2, U.2, EDSFF, and dozens of variants with different length, thickness, heat shielding, power draw, and battery backup features.

Consumer applications tend to use solder down BGA components like UFS and eMMC.

All managed NAND storage products require careful consideration of the associated firmware that controls the communication between storage device and host processor.

Navigate the complex semiconductor supply chain with the help of a trusted advisor.