There has been a number of submission on HN discussing the chip shortage - and I’ve yet to see anyone discussing using second hand chips, scavenging from used electronics. Obviously as described in the post: redesign is always going to be expensive and cause delays if even possible. But I’m still curious as to why this would not be possible or at least create a much bigger immediate market for old chips?
Salvage is very expensive and risky: There's nothing like the high-speed and reliable PCB assembly process for dissasembling PCBs, only manual processes, and even with skilled workers there's some risk of damaging the chips, if they aren't already damaged when you got them. And there's definitely no economic way to test the chips to ensure they meet spec. You can do it in a pinch for very high value low volume products; for a thousand or more consumer devices, no chance.
Reliability and in general it not beimg able to scale salvaging 5 chips to salvaging 50 000 chips.
Your margins well be gone if there are any significant failures in the field.
Salvage is ok for R&D or high cost assemblies with big FPGA's.
