The global microchip industry is on a tightrope, fearing that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will trigger another crisis in the already shaky market, depriving it of access to raw materials such as neon gas and palladium, which are necessary for their construction.
According to Kathimerini, the cessation of world trade during the pandemic, the concentration of semiconductor production in a few industries, but also the surge in demand for electronic devices during the pandemic caused significant shortages in these crucial components, the used from the production of drones and smartphones to the production of cars and spaceships.
The Russian invasion may bring a new wave of delays in the delivery of orders.
In this context, giants but also very small high-tech companies, many of which produce hardware products in our country, face long delays in the delivery of orders and, due to shortages in microchips, are forced to reorganize the basic structure of the systems they develop. . “The delays in receiving the microchips have not stopped, although lately I have noticed that they are more manageable.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine may bring a new wave of delays, something that depends on the duration of the conflicts,” George Dimitropoulos, general manager of Adveos Microelectronic Systems, a Greek company that designs integrated electronics, told K. chips and was acquired 1.5 years ago by the Chinese Beken Corporation.
The company, when designing microchips, creates some prototypes which are manufactured in factories of companies in Asia, such as TSMC or UMC. Then they return to Greece to be tested at the Adveos research and development center in Neo Psychiko.
“Before the pandemic, the waiting time for the receipt of the microchip was 3 months, last year it had reached 6-7 months, while now we received chips that we had sent to the factories in August – September. Finally, we sent some in December and they informed us that we will receive them by March – April. “The delays seem to be limited, but I do not know how much and if they will be affected by the conflict in Ukraine.” “The construction of the prototype is not controlled by us, as we do not know which raw material suppliers the Taiwanese TSMC that manufactures our prototype chip has.”
Ukraine, through the company Cryoin, produces neon gas used to power lasers, necessary during the printing process of circuits. According to a Wired report, Cryoin supplies companies in Europe, Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan, while most of the neon it produces is shipped to the US.
In fact, the chip industry is already worried about the implications of the Cryoin supply disruption, recalling that the price of neon had risen 600% in 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea. Russia is the largest producer of palladium – a metal also used to make microchips – accounting for 40% of world production. That is why sanctions against the country will exacerbate the problems facing industry in the supply chain.
Greek start-ups that make hardware systems also face delays in the delivery of new orders. Such is the case of startup Centaur Analytics, an agro-technology company, which started in Volos and now has a presence in Athens and Southern California. The company has developed sensors that “monitor” the storage conditions of products (wheat, corn, rice), sending measurements of temperature, humidity, oxygen, phosphine, etc., in order to avoid deterioration or quality degradation of the product.
“The delays in receiving microchips that are placed in the sensors are long. “Sometimes there are equivalent materials, but other times we need to redesign the products to place material with similar functionality,” said Sotiris Bandas, president and CEO of Centaur Analytics, which serves approximately 100 customers worldwide.
“It is not so much the prices of the materials we put in our products as their lack of availability,” Dionysis Bitas, co-founder of Kytion Robotics, another agro-technology company that has developed a robotic system, aims to help producers and agronomists to monitor and manage their crops remotely. “The situation has become difficult and unfortunately our team needed new methods of connecting the components, as well as different types of microprocessors, which led to a different internal implementation of our system, both in industrial design and code,” he said, adding that “there is shortage of small computers, such as the raspberry pi that we procured from Greece and were the main server for the retransmission of the measurements of our system.
“We also find it difficult to find materials that are immediately available in 3D printers and are important for a hardware startup like ours.”
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I have over 8 years of experience in the news industry. I have worked for various news websites and have also written for a few news agencies. I mostly cover healthcare news, but I am also interested in other topics such as politics, business, and entertainment. In my free time, I enjoy writing fiction and spending time with my family and friends.
