Quote:
Originally Posted by Piotrsko
AFAIK, the bare wafers. The one major manufacturing facility slowed down because orders dried up and it takes them a long while to re-speed back up. No dies, nothing to grow chips on and JIT sucks on error recovery for critical parts, particularly when they are long lead expensive.
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That's part of the reason why my previous employer never stopped making wafers when there were fewer orders. Just keep the machines running and store the excess product for when it's needed later.
It doesn't take that long to spin back up though. We would schedule a shut down to upgrade a power circuit somewhere, and make it coincide with the planned 1:00am shutdown for "fall back" time change. They'd be up and running within 24hrs of the shut down. Of course, it takes forever to melt down silicon rocks, let alone grow the crystal ingots, but we're talking a day or 2 of lost production and not weeks.
The bottleneck was DSP, so shutting down the crystal pullers didn't really put the company behind schedule either.