Am 15.06.2022 um 16:12 schrieb Uwe Bonnes:
Amen. Or, as the saying goes:
"All prognoses are hard, even more so those concerning the future."
(Made famous by Niels Bohr, but may have been a widely known in his home country of Denmark before that).
Let's face it: unless you're a major customer (and no, an order volume of a million units does not reliably make you one), any and all expectations about parts availability in the micro controller market that reach further than a few months into the future are recklessly optimistic. And that was how it was _before_ the pandemic and all its side effects.
If you need to be sure you have those chips in quantity x over the run of a given product, and x has fewer than 7 digits, your only truly safe bet is to stockpile the whole lot up front. The next-safest plan would be to stockpile enough of them to tide you over the conservatively estimated time for a redesign of the board and most of the lower-level software. Obviously neither of those options is cheap; but the main alternative is that you may one day have to discontinue your whole product because that one part suddenly turned into unobtainium.