  Mitigating losses from supply and demand volatility in the semiconductor
supply chain and market has traditionally been cast as a logistics and
forecasting problem. We investigate how the architecture of a family of chips
influences how it is affected by supply and demand uncertainties. We observe
that semiconductor supply chains become fragile, in part, due to single demand
paths, where one chip can satisfy only one demand. Chip architects can enable
multiple paths to satisfy a chip demand, which improves supply chain
resilience. Based on this observation, we study composition and adaptation as
architectural strategies to improve resilience to volatility and also introduce
a third strategy of dispersion. These strategies allow multiple paths to
satisfy a given chip demand. We develop a model to analyze the impact of these
architectural techniques on supply chain costs under different regimes of
uncertainties and evaluate what happens when they are combined. We present
several interesting and even counterintuitive observations about the product
configurations and market conditions where these interventions are impactful
and where they are not. In all, we show that product redesign supported by
architectural changes can mitigate nearly half of the losses caused by supply
and demand volatility. As far as we know, this is the first such investigation
concerning chip architecture.
