The Chip Shortage Taught Us One Thing: Don't Vendor-Lock Your Firmware
Between 2021 and 2024, I watched firmware teams go through the five stages of grief. Their chip was on a 52-week lead time. The drop-in replacement didn’t exist. And their entire codebase was welded to one vendor’s HAL. Now that lead times have mostly normalized, it’s tempting to forget. Don’t. The shortage exposed a structural weakness in how most teams write firmware, and the fix isn’t “keep more inventory.” It’s in how you architect your code. ...