I buy my chips directly from China when I can. The fact is, if I buy it from a distributor here, it comes from the same place but costs a stupid amount more. I’m talking about opamps that are 80 cents from China but 30 dollars on digikey.
The US has a greedy middle man issue. I think bringing up home grown production is good for security reasons but I know someone’s buddy is going to get all the profit and we won’t actually have competitive prices.
Making a prototype of something is bloody expensive already, even when dealing directly with China.
It depends on what kind of IC you need. If you need an authentic part that has been tracked and verified through every step of distribution, you pay a premium.
For hobby products, sure. Spend 30 cents on that 5 dollar part.
However, a bad batch of fake ICs could potentially cost a company millions of dollars in returns, or worst case, liability lawsuits. (It has personally only cost me a few bucks and some wasted time.)
My personal trust in any Chinese sourced electronics is zero. It’s less than zero if I attempt to buy a proper name brand IC. I ain’t salty about it since I know my odds of getting defective or improperly labeled (or relabeled) parts: Expect about a 30% failure rate or parts that are way out of spec.
Simply put, QA is generally poor and the supply chain is sketchy. If that doesn’t matter to you, so be it.
What happens is it chips do come from the same Chinese manufacturer, you can get spectacularly different grades of parts depending on how you bought them.
It is the same with automotive parts. Anything imported from China has at least a 40% markup before it is resold.
The US has a greedy middle man issue.
Same in Europe.
For most hobby projects I just try to stay within the jlcpcb smt assembly parts library these days. For some reason it has actually gotten harder to get parts locally over the years as a consumer.
That has actually lowered the bar for small prototypes/projects enough that I’m using it for some company projects (PCB design isn’t something we normally do but it can be very useful at times).
They only say it’s free market when it’s in their favor.
A simple is just to look out where you can buy chips. You’ll not find them on amazon but on aliexpress.
There’s some shady export behavior from Trump on this first term. He who has the most chips wins. China IS winning.
Chips = military win.
So it’s worth watching Trump on this during this term. Tariffs on imports could be a slight of hand distraction, something he loves to do, so no one pays attention to exports.
