After a handful of years marked with component shortages, expanding lead times, pandemic-related supply chain disruption and most recently a ground war, “business as usual” is a relative term. The electronics industry has been especially turbulent, but supply chain businesses see both challenge and opportunity.

As the global semiconductor industry breaks ground on dozens of new fabs, there’s a side effect that chip makers don’t like to advertise: product obsolescence. Current supply chain dynamics could drive a large number of end-of-life (EOL) semiconductors into short supply.

The electronic component shortage is likely to get worse before it gets better. As a result, electronics prices are on track to rise this year – and it may not be until late 2023 before prices begin to fall.

Federal agents have begun questioning U.S. technology companies on how their computer chips ended up in Russian military equipment recovered in Ukraine.

The Commerce Department on Wednesday announced it has frozen the export privileges of three U.S. companies for the illegal export to China of technical drawings used for 3D printing of satellite, rocket and defense-related parts.

2022 has not even passed the halfway point and has already presented new – major – challenges for the electronics manufacturing supply chain. While the industry is doing all it can to alleviate current supply chain constraints – it still has to fight earthquakes, lockdowns and logistical headaches.

Since Avnet surveyed its customers in late 2021 about their challenges with the component shortage, the industry is making slow progress to finding an end to the current constraints.But when we do get there, the electronics engineering world as we know it will be fundamentally changed and stronger partnerships will be formed with procurement and supply chain experts.

The imagery of a chain is a compelling one—interconnected links that are both flexible and strong. That strength is wholly dependent on those links remaining intact, however, and a supply chain is no different. The breaks have come in several places in the supply chain over the past three years.

A petrochemical processor was recently forced to make an emergency shutdown to reveal that it was being supplied with counterfeit bearings. Most people do not fully appreciate the scale of the counterfeiting problem or the risks it creates.

Some metals, like nickel and lithium, are household names; indeed, advertisements for batteries play on the exotic sound of "lithium-ion" as though it were a novelty, despite lithium's ubiquity in electric cars and gadgets. Yet the true drivers of the digital economy are the rare earth metals, without which modern electronic devices would not work. Once virtually unknown outside of geochemistry research, these metals, which include neodymium and praseodymium, as constituents of powerful magnets used in hard drives and computer speakers.