With social media spinning various narratives on the impact of global chip shortages on AV industry products, AV Technology reached out to Audinate to directly respond to questions that have been on everyone’s mind regarding the company’s Dante platform. Bryce Dunn, senior director of Product Management at Audinate provided the following.
Bryce Dunn, senior director of Product Management at Audinate provided the following.
How Global Supply Chain Issues Impact Our Industry
Semiconductor supply chain issues have been elevated in our industry’s consciousness, just as it has been raised in the broader global technology realm. The issue gets attention in the media and in meetings as it impacts availability of product, which in turn, impacts the milestones of an installation/integration assignment.
Audinate OEM partners design and build a broad array of AV equipment for these customers, and we have heard first-hand the challenges they’re encountering in sourcing components. We believe no responsible manufacturer will wait patiently for these issues to play out and for component availability to normalize. Many have contingency strategies in place to harden their supply chain and to engineer versatility into their product strategies.
Our team at Audinate made the decision in early 2021 to initiate the development of potential replacements for microchips used in our product portfolio. This important program centered on sourcing replacements for chips that had many years of life left. Planning more than five years out for a replacement is well beyond the industry standard, but our leadership group believed the move was crucial to ensuring our supply chain and for minimizing the impact of potential chip shortages.
Bryce Dunn, Sr. Director of Product Management at Audinate
Recently, a major chip supplier significantly reduced the number of certain parts available to the industry. The early impact was industry-wide and we did everything we could to support industry resilience by accelerating the switch to new and more available parts, and by also representing the needs of Dante manufacturers to chip suppliers.
Today, our team is successfully working with OEM partners to minimize disruptions and we are coordinating with the chip manufacturer and others to acquire inventory of the affected parts. We are also accelerating the in-motion product transitions to platforms with improved long-term availability, and are actively working with our OEM partners to migrate to our next-generation parts, and/or migrate to other parts in our portfolio not affected by this chip shortage.
The recent situation serves to reinforce the work we are already doing to make this happen, including:
- Expediting chip replacement options ahead of end-of-life timelines,
- Developing drop-in replacements for Dante modules for existing product designs, and
- Investing in the increasingly important software-based offerings such as Dante Application Library and Dante Embedded Platform.
Managing supply chain issues will be a mission-critical priority for the AV industry and our community in the years ahead. Issues like connectivity, interoperability and standardized protocols are now more important and useful than ever, and as a trusted leader in advancing connectivity, interoperability and standardized protocols, we understand our unique responsibility to OEMs, integrators and end-users at this critical time and in the future.
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