I know they're separate lines and capacity is sold well in advance and all that, but this chip shortage still baffles me.

A startup can tape out a 5 nm chip, but STMicroelectronics can't make any of their 40-130 nm microcontrollers for the next year?

Also car companies are supposedly the culprit, even though their volume is only in the low tens of millions per year, and the dustup is apparently over only six months of capacity? What? I get that the auto industry is a nice reliable long-term source of revenue for chip companies, but fabs should barely be sneezing at that sort of volume.

lizknope

I'm in the semiconductor company.

I don't really understand your question.

Anyone can start a company and tape out a chip even in 5nm. My previous startup did something similar. We used an intermediate company between us and TSMC that specifically works with smaller companies. They (or TSMC) will bundle together 4 to 20 chips into a common mask as a "shuttle" run. Shuttle runs are really only used to get samples for the first version of your chip. You can't really go to production with them because the mask has chips from multiple different companies but this allows all of the companies to share the mask costs (I've heard up to $30 million for 5nm)

What is ST Micro talking about? I assume they can produce chips but can't get the volume that they want. SiFive are probably producing about 2,000 of these chips for development and test boards. ST Micro would be buying in the hundreds of millions or tens of billions range.

varispeed

Out of curiosity - what software is being used to design chips? Is there anything within reach of a small company, or something open source?

jecel

The commercial tools are indeed very expensive but the required data files can be as much of a problem. Normally you have to sign a bunch of NDAs (non disclosure agreements) to get your hands on the design rules and standard cell libraries supplied by the foundries and required to make the tools work.

One effort to organize several previously available open source tools into a practical system is OpenLane, which is based on the DARPA OpenRoad project:

https://woset-workshop.github.io/PDFs/2020/a21.pdf

Recently, Google has financed a project where a foundry has made its data files available without any NDAs:

https://github.com/google/skywater-pdk

The combination has made it possible to have completely open source chip designs.