Decentralizing Chip Fabrication
If you subscribe now, you’ll get access to additional commentary on this story plus a bonus story coming next Tuesday.
Two women with suits walked into his manager’s office. Brian could tell that they were in an unpleasant move. As soon as they stepped inside, his manager closed the door gingerly. There was an apologetic look on his face.
They were probably unhappy clients. The tsunami that struck Taiwan had shut down production facilities there at the same time that other regional facilities were still recovering from the recent typhoon. This resulted in a sizable chip shortage. Engineering firms like this one had run out of parts, so now they were not able to fulfill their contracts.
“Brian, can you come in here?” his manager asked from the doorframe.
“How can I help?” Brian asked as he stepped inside the office.
“This is Olivia and Ava, from the city farming concern. They had planned to double the capacity for their vertical farms, but I had to tell them we can’t produce any more sensors until the shortage is resolved,” Liam explained.
“Once the factory production returns to normal they’ll have a sizable backlog to go through. Assuming the ones outside of Taiwan can ramp up in the next week, it may still be a while before our shipments return to normal,” Brian offered with a hint of dread.
“There’s nothing you can do, at all?” one of the farmers asked.
“We use the underlying chips to build our sensors. We have no more in stock that we can use,” Liam noted.
“Liam, I might have an idea,” Brian thought aloud.
“Go work on it and I’ll finish up with these women. We will have to come to some sort of an understanding.”
Nearly an hour later Liam walked over to Brian’s desk to see a chip on his desk.
“Where did this come from? Is there a stash I don’t know about?” Liam asked with a hint of hostility.
“I went down to see Maria in R&D. They’ve got one of those chip printers. I just had to give her the schematic and it came out just a minute ago,” Brian explained.
“So we can just print all the chips we need in-house?”
“Not quite. It takes about half-an-hour to produce one, and we’ve only got one printer. At best we’d only get forty-eight a day, which is not enough.”
“I think I know how we can get up our production.”
By the end of the week Liam had gotten enough of his friends, and their friends, on board. A network was established to connect their chip fabricators to the firm and follow a set of instructions. They would pay each person for the materials and shipping, plus a bit extra. By Monday, they were already receiving chips in the mail.
It wasn’t a panacea. Each chip had to be manually tested, and there were a few quality issues. Yet they were able to start fulfilling orders again with the limited supply they had.
Liam had to be the face of the operation, negotiating with each client to push back full delivery for the moment to ensure at least of quarter of each contract was completed.
Brian was given a larger technical role, in charge of the QA group while spending much of his time on the chip network. The chip they were using was open source, the schematics were fully available online. Brian spent time rerouting wires and changing the pinouts. The original chip was fine, but his optimizations cut the production time in half on the printers.
As news of the network spread through social media, they were soon seeing hundreds of 3D printers signing up. Brian hesitantly started turning them away. They had reached full production through individual contributors. While costs were a bit more expensive, the additional reliability of a distributed production line and flexibility of smaller orders were hard to ignore. Liam would not renew the contract with their fabrication partners.
The engineering team went out for drinks on Friday night. A toast was raised to Brian, as his work and ingenuity had let them finish out their contracts and kept clients happy.
“We really appreciate it Brian,” his manager said to him as they were waiting for an autonomous vehicle to drive them home.
“I’m glad that I could do something,” Brian shrugged. “It was really your friends that allowed us to meet our quotas.”
“Building a network takes time, but you really came through for us. You could be a good leader if you wanted it.”