HACKER Q&A
📣 consumer451

Should countries have strategic semiconductor reserves?


The USA has strategic reserves of some commodities, for example: petroleum and cheese. We have seen issues with supply chains in semiconductors recently.

Is it realistic to stockpile specific chips, or does the industry move too fast for such a stockpile to be useful?

  👤 eternityforest Accepted Answer ✓
We should have ISO standard Arduino-like modules, that can do most of the smarts for stuff, not change them for 25 years(We can add models or replace with equivalents, but we stay LTS), and design our stuff around them.

Then we'd have something to stockpile that wasn't a single source soon to be obsolete thing, and we'd solve a lot of right to repair issues.

We should be assuming that the whole tech industry is both fragile and a high value target not only in wartime, but by Kaczynski types, and also is even at risk of fading away and being forgotten at least partially.

It doesn't seem like much thought at all is going towards preventing the collapse.