Manufacturers have blamed COVID-19 for causing shortages of CPUs, GPUs, and chips found in countless products, but companies now fear the pandemic may limit the supply of another critical part: multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs), The Wall Street Journal reports.
They don’t often make their way into keynote presentations discussing the latest-and-greatest products, but capacitors are found in most things that runs on electricity. Everything from smartphones and game consoles to appliances and electric vehicles rely on capacitors.
“The components are sometimes called the rice of the electronics industry,” the Journal reports, “both because a single one is smaller than a grain of rice and because they are a staple component that no iPhone, PlayStation videogame console, or advanced car can live without.”
Which is exactly why the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 throughout Asia has reportedly worried some manufacturers. The Journal says the world’s leading MLCC supplier, Murata, had to shut down one of its largest factories for the last week of August because of the pandemic. Another, Taiyo Yuden, reduced a Malaysian factory’s capacity to roughly 80% because it had to limit its workforce. Other factories could face similar restrictions depending on local conditions.
These fears continue a common theme of the pandemic: the world is more interconnected than many people realize. Thousands of companies produce a similar number of components used in a single product, and if even one component is unavailable, the entire supply chain is disrupted.
