Future-Ready Supply Chains: How Avnet Silica Enables Confident Power Engineering
The global trend towards electrification is transforming the field of power electronics. Applications ranging from electric vehicles and renewable energy systems to industrial automation and next-generation consumer electronics demand compact, energy-efficient power conversion solutions. This dynamic environment places unprecedented demands on supply chains, with access to reliable and diverse power electronics components critical to innovation, speed-to-market, and long-term business success.
A resilient, responsive, and strategically diversified supply chain enables engineering teams to focus on innovation rather than addressing sourcing challenges, mitigating risks associated with global disruptions, and ensuring that development programs can proceed without delay.
As a best-in-class partner, Avnet Silica has a long history of helping our customers build robust supply chains while overcoming disruptive sourcing challenges. With a broad network of market-leading suppliers, global manufacturing insights, advanced supply chain management tools, and a team of highly experienced technical and logistics experts, we provide customers with stability, agility, and access to the latest power technologies.
Our collaborative approach with both customers and suppliers ensures access to cutting-edge components, from early-stage releases to mature, high-volume products. By combining supply chain excellence with in-depth technical expertise, we enable engineering teams to confidently innovate, accelerate development timelines, and deliver next-generation solutions to market with minimised risk. This article examines how supplier diversity, tailored supply chain tools, and expert partnerships collaborate to foster a resilient power electronics ecosystem.
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Strength in Supplier Diversity and Geographic Reach
Recent global events vividly illustrate how reliance on a single supplier or a single manufacturing region magnifies supply chain risk, leaving little room to manoeuvre when disruptions occur. In October 2020, a three-day fire at a Japanese semiconductor caused a significant disruption to the global supply chain for a specific range of audio components, and in 2021, the Suez Canal blockage impacted a wide range of industries, further highlighting the need for increased supply chain resilience and flexibility. These are not isolated events; the global business environment is continually changing, with new trading protocols (like Brexit), changing tariffs, technology restrictions and many other factors increasing global supply chain volatility and risk.
For engineers and buying teams, this volatility can mean higher workloads, and compromised productivity, as they implement workarounds to issues with component availability. A missed SiC MOSFET shipment, for example, can delay prototypes, with a knock-on effect on production schedules, while a discontinued component family can trigger expensive and time-consuming redesign work. Businesses can no longer treat these as point incidents and must consider how to proactively make supply chains more resilient to future disruptions.
Avnet Silica understands that both supplier diversity and regional diversity are key components of supply chain resilience. By partnering with many of the industry’s leading suppliers of power semiconductors and modules, we ensure that our customers are not reliant on a single source, reducing vulnerability to production delays or regional disruptions.
We have also established a supplier network that spans multiple continents, including locations outside of China, thereby mitigating risks associated with trade restrictions, natural disasters, or localised supply interruptions. Certain manufacturer SiC MOSFET production lines, for instance, are based in Europe or the U.S., providing alternative sourcing paths and continuity for global customers. This distributed network helps ensure that production timelines remain stable, even during periods of geopolitical or logistical uncertainty.
But we also realise that supply chain resilience goes beyond diversity, and at Avnet Silica we focus on the three pillars of resilience:
- Transparency (how far down the line can you see issues coming?)
- Agility (how quickly can you adjust in the face of disruption?)
- Assurance (how can you absorb the initial impact of a major disruption?)
This three-pillar model informs everything we do, from our collaborative approach to supplier and customer relationships to the tools and value-added services that we offer.
MYSUPPLY from Avnet Silica
So you have fine-tuned the technology and developed a brilliant product, but can you deliver a stable and sustainable supply to your customers? That’s where we come in. With our dedicated supply chain solution, MySupply.
Building Transparency through Expertise and Collaborative Partnerships
Solid relationships across the entire supply chain are key to building transparency, and Avnet Silica’s collaborative approach is a fundamental enabler of this transparency. When component supplies are constrained and subject to allocation, a line of sight all the way through to tier 2 on a supply chain gives advance warning of upcoming issues, and our in-house teams facilitate this close engagement.
Strong lines of communication within our extensive supplier portfolio ensure early visibility of any issues likely to impact our customers’ business. Component end-of-life dates are known and communicated well in advance and the impact of structural changes in the supply chain, such as acquisitions or relationship changes, can be anticipated and workarounds planned. The diversity of our supplier portfolio and the quality of our relationships support effective contingency planning, ensuring that we are there to support our customers, ensuring continuity under the most challenging circumstances.
Transparency also ensures early access to emerging technologies. The power electronics landscape is continually evolving, as manufacturers respond to growing demands for enhanced efficiencies and smaller form factors, and Avnet Silica ensures that our customers stay ahead of the curve. Our in-house experts can work with you to identify and select the best technologies for your applications, and our “ear to the ground” approach allows your development teams to align project timelines with the next emerging technology, reducing risk, accelerating product launches, and ensuring that designs leverage the latest performance and efficiency improvements.
Recently, for example, customers working with us were able to benefit from early visibility and access to innovative products such as the STGAP3 and STGAP4 SiC devices from STMicroelectronics, the Vega and Gemini SiC MOSFET families, and the latest SiC MOSFETs from Diodes.
Increasing Resilience with Supply Chain Tools and Tailored Solutions
While strong relationships are key to a resilient supply chain, Avnet Silica’s three-pillar approach is also heavily supported by a comprehensive suite of supply chain tools and tailored solutions.
Disaggregation is key to supply chain visibility, enabling customers to separate out their orders at each supplier in the chain, but it can be costly to implement, consuming valuable resources, and many organisations rely on a partner to support them. At Avnet Silica, we implement disaggregation by creating ‘supply chain node identifiers’ unique to the customers we’re working with. This allows tiers 1 and 2 to know who they’re manufacturing parts for, with a unique identifier allocated to each customer part. The customer then has complete visibility of their parts allocation and can easily pinpoint dysfunctional components in the event of a recall.
Additionally, our tailored supply chain solution, MySupply leverages our wealth of experience, based on our own operations and the thousands of customers that we serve globally every day. For selected customers, a dedicated supply chain architect will get to the heart of your business, exploring issues up and down the supply chain. We will then build a dedicated solution, following the Supply-Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) methodology, and drawing on major industry suppliers, specialist field engineers and on-the-ground local experts. With MySupply, customers get the best combination of experience and insight to solve specific supply chain challenges.
Alongside MySupply we offer a rich palette of supply-chain tools, developed to enhance supply chain resilience, including:
- Kanban solutions to reduce on-hand inventory, streamline order management and accelerate fulfilment with shorter cycle times for material replenishment.
- An advanced Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) solution which reduces the time and cost of inventory tracking and administration, while giving you the peace of mind of knowing that the components you need will be replenished at the right time and in the right amount.
- A range of forecasting and consignment tools and value-added services, including product modification services such as bar coding, tape and reeling, and programming.
Enabling Confident Innovation
The modern power electronics landscape is complex, rapidly evolving, and increasingly global. Success depends not only on innovative designs but also on the ability to access the right components at the right time with confidence.
By combining supplier diversity, advanced supply chain tools, in-depth technical expertise, and unparalleled transparency into a single ecosystem, Avnet Silica supports customers from concept through production. Through geographically distributed manufacturing and multi-supplier strategies, customers gain stability, choice, and early access to cutting-edge technologies. Tailored inventory management, predictive demand planning, and strategic collaboration enable agility, reduce risk, and accelerate product development cycles.
Meanwhile, our expert teams provide design guidance, application support, and access to supplier insights, ensuring engineering decisions are informed, efficient, and forward-looking. Our focus on system-level solutions supports improved design decision-making, as we consider your entire project from the ground up. This approach helps ensure compatibility and future-proof designs.
This combination of diverse suppliers, robust logistics, early access to innovation, supply chain transparency, and expert support empowers customers to innovate confidently, navigate global complexity, and get to market faster with next-generation power solutions.
In a rapidly evolving industry, partnering with Avnet Silica is more than a supply chain decision—it is a strategic enabler of innovation, resilience, and market leadership.
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