Garmin just issued an email to its dealers that effectively suspends the shipment of some of its products that were ordered on or after Sept 1, 2021. I ordered a GTN 750xi on Sept 1. It was to be shipped the end of this month on Nov 29, 2021. Shipments had been running 12 weeks to 14 weeks for new orders and some dealers were willing to pay over dealer cost to complete shipments. My GTN 750xi is now scheduled for April of 2022 The units affected are:
Products currently impacted by these new supply chain constraints include:
- GTN 750Xi (all variations)
o Excludes GTN 725Xi
- GTN 650Xi, GTN 635Xi (all variations)
o Excludes GTN 625Xi
- GTX 345, GTX 345R, GTX 45R Series (all variations)
o Excludes GTX 335, GTX 335R, GTX 35R
- GTR 225 (all variations)
- GNC 255 (all variations)
- GNX 375
It must be parts related to the Com units and the ADS-B receiver which one can deduce by the units that are affected. OTOH, it may be that demand for the GTN 725xi, GTN 625Xi, and GTX 335 series is relatively low and they may have inventory on hand.
This is going to impact many avionics shop installations and used units will carry a premium if one has one in hand and is selling it.
NCYankee wrote:
Garmin just issued an email to its dealers that effectively suspends the shipment of some of its products that were ordered on or after Sept 1, 2021.
Our avionics shop claimed last week that one of Garmin’s major chip suppliers had stopped delivering to them – but he didn’t know the reason.
All manner of chips have been in ultra-high demand for over a year. Mercedes and Ford have massively scaled back the production of new cars (probably everyone else too). There has been a perfect storm of huge demand for tablets for online schooling and working, crypto guys buying all the GPUs, and reduced output at foundries due to the pandemic. I don’t know about elsewhere but used cars are going for crazy money in Ireland at the moment. My model BMW is selling for the same price I bought it for 3 years ago. I’m constantly on the fence between dual 275s and a 650 or Aspen Pro Max and a 440. I guess this will make the decision for me as the installer has the latter combo in stock but there will be months of a wait for the former.
It’s a complicated situation and it varies according to who you speak to, because just about everybody in the trade has an axe to grind / has a mandate to spread disinformation. With a 0.50 chip selling for 2.50, the beneficial effect on margins of this shortage is massive. I’ve been in this business since 1978 and seen it many times. I posted my version here.
Some “impossible to get” chips (e.g. ST ARM CPUs) are being delivered now, so it is about to crack. But the industry will keep a lid on it for as long as they can because they are printing money and don’t want it to end.
Eventually there will be a massive stock overhang which will need to be offloaded, because the big players are not interested in sitting on 1-2 years’ of stock. At best, they will offload it by not buying anything for a year or two; at worst they will flog it off to cowboy surplus stock dealers (the sort of people everybody hates because they sell a $5 chip for $90, but “somehow” they have it in stock) and both of these will cause a bloodbath in the chip pricing.
The car makers are running long supply and planning pipelines so they will take longer to sort it out. Also you must never waste a good crisis 
At work, I am designing-out chips from blatently opportunistic crooks like Maxim, who in their blind arrogance (e.g. they switched their customer interface from email to opening “quote request tickets” on their website, so no “dialogue” is possible) seem to have forgotten that a lot of their chips have equivalents from ST etc. New PCBs are being multi-tracked for 2 or even 3 devices. But one can’t do anything about CPUs and other specialised chips. Luckily, due to my advanced age and wisdom, most of my designs use old commodity parts
Garmin are sort of halfway up the pecking order and they will have over-ordered by several times, so they played a full part in creating the crisis, but they seem to have run out of some parts nevertheless. I can’t say I feel sorry for them.
We have agreed on a G3X Touch installation on our TU206G project with Woodgate Aviation our local Garmin dealer, to be completed sometime in Q1 2021. All the LRU boxes are being ordered by them today, so it will be interesting to see what lead time we get after they make the order.
Peter wrote:
Garmin are sort of halfway up the pecking order
Optimistic view!
Suppliers know that changing the manufacturer for a component in an avionics device would require a lengthy and costly reengineering and recertification. There is absolutely no downside for a supplier to stop delivery for some weeks/months.
I’m working on a project right now, and Lattice FPGAs are pretty much impossible to get hold of until late January (specifically the ICE40 HX4K devices in tqfp 144 packages) unless you’re willing to pay Chinese scalpers £35+ per chip (the HX4K is £5 in one-off quantities from the usual suspects, RS, Farnell, Mouser etc). I wouldn’t be surprised if Garmin use CPLDs/FPGAs and if the one they use is not available, they are out of luck. Flash memory is another difficult one, although at least with SPI flash, you can usually get around it by getting a different capacity device (same number of pins regardless of size) or a different manufacturer as the pinout is a JEDEC standard (as is the command structure). A friend of mine is having trouble getting hold of Wiznet ethernet controllers.
Even some manufacturer’s passives are on long back order, but at least with an 0603 ceramic capacitor there’s a smorgasbord of suppliers.
The problem is widespread supply issues is what kicks inflation off (after all, inflation is literally too much money chasing too few goods).
alioth wrote:
Even some manufacturer’s passives are on long back order,
Passives have been a challenge even long before the current chip crisis has started: Since (at least) 2010 the OEMs have negotiated down the prices so much that in the end too few manufacturers were willing/able to continue at these price levels. Therefore for some of this components there are only 0-2 suppliers left which did not have the capacity to fulfill all global demand.
This is a good business school case on demand/supply regulating the price is a great theory but if there is a significant time lag on ramping supply up or down it doesn’t work out that well in practice…
There is absolutely no downside for a supplier to stop delivery for some weeks/months.
Except that if you can screw somebody, and they will take steps to ensure you can’t do it again (unless they are stupid). So any new designs won’t use your chips.
Lattice FPGAs are pretty much impossible to get hold of
Like processors, you can’t design them out easily… you are over a barrel. The only solution is a large strategic stock.
Flash memory is another difficult one, although at least with SPI flash, you can usually get around it by getting a different capacity device (same number of pins regardless of size) or a different manufacturer as the pinout is a JEDEC standard (as is the command structure)
That’s true if you are using common 4k-block SPI FLASH Adesto for example have two different pinouts for their 512-byte sector size ones…
Passives have been a challenge even long before the current chip crisis has started
Passives have not been a challenge at all IME. Prices have hardened a little, from say 0.001 per resistor to 0.0015 (50k qty). I use 0805 and 0603.
Peter wrote:
Prices have hardened a little, from say 0.001 per resistor to 0.0015 (50k qty)
That is a 50% price increase! I wouldn’t call it "hardened a little …
