Mitigating losses from supply and demand volatility in the semiconductor supply chain and market has traditionally been cast as a logistics and forecasting problem. We investigate how the architecture of a family of chips influences how it is affected by supply and demand uncertainties. We observe that semiconductor supply chains become fragile, in part, due to single demand paths, where one chip can satisfy only one demand. Chip architects can enable multiple paths to satisfy a chip demand, which improves supply chain resilience. Based on this observation, we study composition and adaptation as architectural strategies to improve resilience to volatility and also introduce a third strategy of dispersion. These strategies allow multiple paths to satisfy a given chip demand. We develop a model to analyze the impact of these architectural techniques on supply chain costs under different regimes of uncertainties and evaluate what happens when they are combined. We present several interesting and even counterintuitive observations about the product configurations and market conditions where these interventions are impactful and where they are not. In all, we show that product redesign supported by architectural changes can mitigate nearly half of the losses caused by supply and demand volatility. As far as we know, this is the first such investigation concerning chip architecture.

翻译：传统上，缓解半导体供应链和市场因供需波动造成的损失被视为一个物流与预测问题。我们研究了芯片系列的架构如何影响其受到供需不确定性的作用。我们观察到，供应链变得脆弱的部分原因在于单一需求路径——即一款芯片只能满足一种需求。芯片架构师可以通过多种路径满足芯片需求，从而提高供应链的韧性。基于这一观察，我们研究组合和适应作为提高应对波动性韧性的架构策略，并引入第三种策略——分散。这些策略使得满足特定芯片需求存在多种路径。我们开发了一个模型，分析这些架构技术在不同不确定性模式下对供应链成本的影响，并评估它们组合时的效果。我们提出了若干有趣甚至反直觉的观察结果，涉及这些干预措施在哪些产品配置和市场条件下有效，以及在哪些条件下无效。总体而言，我们表明，通过架构变化支持的重新设计可以缓解近一半由供需波动造成的损失。据我们所知，这是首次关于芯片架构的此类研究。