The electronics manufacturing problem is well illustrated by the situation in the display market. Today, these are not only TVs and computer monitors, but also screens for automotive electronics, for household appliances - from coffee makers to refrigerators, for smartphones and tablets, and much more. At the heart of every piece of this vast product range is a small display driver chip, often costing well under one US dollar. But if it is absent then a product with a price of hundreds and thousands of dollars will remain inoperative.

Display drivers are available on silicon wafers with a diameter of 200 mm or less. For their manufacture, the so-called mature technical processes are used with norms from 16 nm and more. On the one hand, such productions have been debugged over the years and even decades, when it comes to technological standards up to 100 nm and higher. This means that the level of scrap is minimal, and the production cost is very, very low. But on the other hand, production equipment with mature standards is worn out to such an extent that its operation is often accompanied by line breakdowns.

It is easy to understand that the increased load on the equipment does not help it to work longer and more reliably. The incidents of accidents are only multiplying. Someone might say that the way out lies in the translation of the release of display drivers on 300-mm plates and more advanced technical processes. But this is not the case. To do this, you need to prepare digital projects, make photomasks and adapt production lines, which will be long and expensive. Also, purchasing new equipment for processing 200 mm plates also will reduce huge record profits of firm owners.

Apparently, chip makers and developers took the path of least resistance. All of them along the chain began to raise prices for products, knowing the consumer will pay for their greed.

This is one of the major information leaks.

Several 200nm lines that had been bought as already used sometimes had been totally worn out.

COVID big fluctuations that caused temporary stops and after this forced work just contributed to big failures across lot of manufacturers.

And now industry is afraid to tell this to people as big profits that firms reported for years partly originate from not spending money on renewal, repairs and buying proper new equipment.