dognotdog

I'm in the position of having to order batches of ~50 boards at a time, and since the beginning of this year more and more electronic parts have been out of stock, even though we designed everything for normally in-stock parts.

Crystals, real-time clocks, solid-state sensors, MCUs, amplifiers, a lot of what's in IoT devices, are now up in 30-52 week lead time range. Often there aren't even alternatives that could be used on a redesigned board. STM, NXP, TI, Bosch, almost any brand seems to be affected.

Does anyone have any insight into where everything went? Are the parts being hoarded, or has there been a genuine large slump in part production or assembly going through the roof?

Are there platforms outside of the regular big distributors (eg. digikey/mouser/etc) where the elusive parts are potentially being traded in low volumes?