In 2021, the electronic components world experienced a situation not seen before: a perfect storm of a global pandemic and an increase in demand for components that massively outstripped supply.
These challenges were felt throughout the entire supply chain. Like many other companies, here at Solid State Supplies we did a variety of things to try and mitigate these shortages as much as possible, including asking customers to increase their forward-looking order book, increasing our stock holding, helping customers with looking at alternative products and sources and attempting to keep customers up to date on the ever-changing situation as much as we could.
The advent of war between Russia and Ukraine is expected to have a significant impact on the global chip shortage.
Russia and Ukraine produce most of the world’s neon gas, essential for chipmaking, so we’re likely to see a shortage of industrial neon. Suppliers will need to use their sourcing teams to help customers with any supply problems which might arise, whilst doing everything they can to increase their own product stockholding.
Looking at the key trends that are likely to be important throughout 2022 the level of deployments in 5G technology is likely to accelerate having risen in 2021.
Here at Solid State Supplies we’re now seeing more customers consider 5G a viable method of connecting to infrastructure. Many applications can benefit from the advantages of 5G, and there are more adopters now – the pandemic has driven up interest in remote monitoring and predictive maintenance to reduce the need for human interaction, and health and safety applications can now move to cellular connectivity due to the latency improvements of 5G.
5G is also bringing evolutionary changes to the IoT and COVID increased the demand for a zero-touch environment.
This means there is an increasing demand for sensors in applications such as thermometers and wearable healthcare tracking devices. The pandemic also made people think about their safety and security more and we continue to see a demand for motion-based detection such as in-home security systems as well as wireless doorbells.
The 3G sunset has driven many industrial and commercial operations to plan their migration to 4G LTE or 5G technology. As the PSTN network is “retired”, users must replace it either with fibre or with a cellular solution; the transition to a fully digital system is picking up pace now and will continue to do so through 2022 as some realise they have left it late.
The trend for more “computing at the edge” continues unabated. Companies move computing power to the edge as more solutions become available that are able to deliver the additional power required. Video analytics is a growing trend as more companies implement AI based systems or use facial recognition in security systems to identify suspicious behaviours and protect against crime.
Renewable energy will also be a significant market in 2022 whether that’s electric vehicles, wind turbines or solar power sources, boosted by ongoing government investment. The war between Russia and Ukraine will also no doubt drive a clean energy security surge.
We’re seeing a lot more interest in related events such as our webinars and seminars and picking up more enquiries as companies in this still-emerging space are looking to add connectivity to their systems as well as displays for the user interfaces.
