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Neural Foundry's avatar

The chip shortage impct on Nissan and Honda really highlights the vulnerabilty of Tier 1 suppliers like Visteon. They're caught in the middle with OEMs cutting production while trying to maitain their cockpit electronics business. Supply chain diversificaton seems to be the only path forward for these companies.

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Nick Gaydos's avatar

This is a great point. It's been a challenging couple of years for automotive suppliers.

Fortunately, I feel supply chain diversification is largely within reach for manufacturers affected by the Nexperia crisis. Unlike automotive semiconductor issues in the past, these are not specialized microprocessors. Most of what Nexperia makes are common, but automotive-grade components. But with the average vehicle these days having north of 10k MLCC capacitors, the diversity in a total vehicle BOM is a crazy amount of work to find equivalent components. It's attainable... It's just a lot of work and a lot of time. And in the automotive industry's idealized just-in-time manufacturing, this pain grows exponentially.

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