Hardware Podcasts

For Want of a Resistor

Oxide and Friends · 16 Sept 2026 · 1h 23m · Episode 21

What this episode covers

Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal host members of Oxide Computer Company’s operations and electrical engineering teams, including CEO Steve Tuck, Robert "RFK" Keith, Eric Aasen, and Scott Tagwerker, to discuss a critical supply chain crisis involving a PCIe clock buffer from Microchip. The team nearly halted production when they discovered the substitute part required a 49.9-ohm termination resistor that was missing from the design, causing clock signals to fail. After a frantic debugging effort involving rework of tiny 0201 resistors and identifying a copy-paste error in part numbers, they implemented a stencil change to integrate the fix into normal manufacturing, saving the production line. The episode highlights the extreme fragility of hardware supply chains and the importance of human engineering judgment in debugging physical failures that AI or automated systems might miss.

Most relevant to

companies scaling up

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Oxide Computer Company, Microchip, Renesas, Cytom, Benchmark Electronics
Products
ZL4264
Also
0201 resistor, 49.9 ohm resistor

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