For Want of a Resistor
Summary
Oxide CEO Steve Tuck discusses the company's critical supply chain crisis involving PCIe clock buffers, explaining how a vendor's generation cutover triggered a shortage during the AI infrastructure boom. The team details the technical constraints of finding a drop-in replacement, including footprint compatibility and termination differences, while navigating a broker market where prices spiked from $3 to over $70. The episode also covers Tuck's recent keynote on AI doomerism and a humorous anecdote about an AI hallucination falsely attributing his blog post to The Simpsons.
Topics discussed
Intro: Brian's arrival and the 'PCIE clock buffer' small talk joke
Adam's viral profile photo and the 'chips without hands' stunt
Yudkowsky's book, AI doomerism, and the 'Okay Doomer' episode
LLMs as brainstorming tools vs. physical hardware constraints
The 'Simpsons' hallucination: Plagiarism fears and grandiloquent style
Welcome Scott: The start of the PCIE clock buffer supply chain crisis
The hard cut: Inventory depletion and market scarcity dynamics
Technical deep dive: What a PCIE clock buffer actually does
Renaissance sells timing business to SiTime; the need for an alt
The difficulty of finding alternatives: Footprint and distribution constraints
Finding the Microchip part: Pin compatibility and the 'pull-up' mystery
Panic buying, price spikes, and the decision to switch vendors
Signal integrity explained: Termination, reflections, and LVHCSL
The 'Probe Effect': How the scope provided the missing termination
First failures: Boot loops and the 'clock sitting high' symptom
The 201 resistor scramble: Sourcing tiny components for rework
Rework execution and the false hope of a quick fix
The 'Oxide' all-hands incident and the gods of supply chain
The failed hypothesis: Why the reworked boards still didn't work
The breakthrough: Measuring the wrong resistor and the 'K' suffix error
Resolution: Correct parts, stencil changes, and relief
Outro: Lessons learned, team shout-outs, and future plans
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