The shortage arrived as a PDF.
Nexperia PCN CN-202603019F, and the clock that doesn't fit.

Nexperia PCN CN-202603019F is dated 13 March 2026 and effective 27 March 2026. Fourteen days. It releases a second assembly site, ATSN in Seremban, Malaysia, for parts that were built and tested at ATGD in Dongguan, and it asks for acknowledgement by 20 March. Silence counted as yes. No wafer ran short. That document is the reason three-cent automotive diodes and transistors have been missing from European lines this year. Here is what it says, why the two clocks don't fit, and where the alternates actually stand in September.

What does Nexperia PCN CN-202603019F actually change?

It releases ATSN, Nexperia's own assembly and test site in Seremban, Malaysia, as an additional site for products previously assembled and tested at ATGD in Dongguan, China, with materials and specifications unchanged and first shipment planned for 27 March 2026.

The notice is headed Extraordinary PCN: Release of additional assembly site ATSN due to exceptional circumstances outside the control of Nexperia B.V. Nothing moves in the die, the package or the datasheet. The building moves. Existing stock from the old site ships until it runs out, and after that the same twelve-digit part number can arrive from either address.

One caveat before you act on any of this. The table of affected part numbers lives inside that PDF, and we could not read it cleanly, so every claim here about dates and wording comes from the notice text while the scope does not. Pull the document from Nexperia or your franchised distributor and walk the 12NC list against your own approved vendor list yourself. The parts you buy directly are the easy half; the rest are buried in Tier 1 modules where you never see the manufacturer's name.

Why is fourteen days' notice a problem on a three-cent part?

Because J-STD-046, the JEDEC standard that governs product change notices, is built around 90 days of notice before changed material ships and 30 days for the customer to object, and CN-202603019F compressed those to 14 days and five working days.

Two windows closed early, and both matter. New orders for the affected part numbers count as acceptance of the change. Say nothing for five working days and you have accepted it as well. Nexperia is entitled to do this: the standard makes room for extraordinary notices, and the company said plainly that circumstances at Dongguan were outside its control. Automotive quality systems have no equivalent clause.

Under PPAP and IATF 16949, a change of assembly or test location is a significant change. It touches process capability, contamination risk and defect rates, which is exactly the ground a Part Submission Warrant covers. So the notice asked a buyer to accept, in five working days, a change their own quality manual treats as a requalification.

Cheapness made it worse. A three-cent SOD123 rectifier or an SC-70 small-signal transistor is designed into more boards than anything expensive on the same BOM, sits inside modules bought from a Tier 1 rather than from Nexperia, and nobody holds six months of it because nobody thought they had to.

How long does a PPAP take on a new assembly site?

Months, not weeks. The sequence is the reason.

The supplier issues process flow, control plan, PFMEA and measurement systems analysis for the new line. Samples ship carrying date codes that identify the new site. Your engineers run dimensional, electrical and functional checks, then read capability data to decide whether Seremban holds tolerance the way Dongguan did. Someone signs the warrant. Where a Tier 1 sits between you and the OEM, that Tier 1 runs the whole sequence again on its own account, and it starts when yours finishes.

Which produced an odd few months on the floor. Nexperia could legally ship from Seremban on 27 March. Buyers could not book it. Incoming material had to be segregated by assembly site, with Dongguan date codes cleared for automotive jobs and Malaysian ones held for industrial, and in some MRP systems one part number was carried as two source-list entries so goods-in could not put an unqualified lot on a car. Planners watched confirmations arrive against orders they were not allowed to consume.

This is the same mechanism we described in July in how automotive qualification decides your lead time, and it keeps catching teams out: the constraint on an automotive line is very often the approval, not the silicon. In March 2026 it was both, in the wrong order.

Can I move the part to onsemi, Diodes or Vishay?

Not quickly, because that is where the rest of the market went in late 2025, and the second source is now quoting longer than the first.

Aetrix reported in July 2026 that Diodes Incorporated lead times had stretched to roughly 40 to 52 weeks across a wide span of active products, MOSFETs, Schottky rectifiers, Zeners, ESD protection and logic among them. The same piece describes an official 74-week response from Diodes on a new order for BSS84-7-F, a mature 50 V P-channel MOSFET in SOT-23. Treat that number carefully. It came from a distributor's own sourcing experience and not from a Diodes announcement, it was quantity-specific, and by 1 September the same part was back to about 40 weeks at an authorised source with scheduled material running into early 2027.

Diodes' own words on its Q2 call on 12 August are the more useful signal. Inventory reached 152 days, or 504.6 million dollars, up 11.8 million on the quarter, built deliberately in raw materials and work in process to cover longer wafer lead times. Channel inventory had fallen below the company's normal 11 to 14 week band. A supplier stockpiling wafers while the channel empties is telling you where the next twelve months go.

onsemi moved in the same direction with less drama. Average product lead time went from about 27 weeks to about 32 during the second quarter of 2026, with selected distributor planning fields on discretes stretching toward 52 weeks and beyond. Rebound's Q3 2026 buyers guide has small-signal MOSFETs at 22 to 52 weeks and low-voltage MOSFETs at 16 to 54. An average of 32 weeks is a comfortable number to report and a useless one to plan with, since the parts you need sit at the top of the range by definition.

Vishay is the least stretched of the three. New-Tech's June 2026 lead time report puts it at 12 to 20 weeks on diodes, in the same table that shows Nexperia at 52 weeks and onsemi at 20 to 24 with SOD123 on allocation. That looks like relief until you map the catalogue: Vishay's discrete range is not a mirror of Nexperia's, and where it does overlap it needs its own PPAP, which returns you to the previous section.

Notice also that the tables disagree with each other. New-Tech had Diodes at 20 to 28 weeks on diodes in June; Aetrix had 40 to 52 across active products in July. Both are honestly reported, from different vantage points, weeks apart. Neither is the number on your quote, and the only lead time worth building an MRP on is the one that comes back against your part number and your quantity.

Dual sourcing worked exactly as designed here. The problem is that most of Europe ran the same design in the same quarter, at the same three vendors, on the same families, so the alternate absorbed a demand spike its wafer and assembly capacity had not planned for. Qualifying Diodes as a second source for a safety-critical discrete is the same PPAP workload as qualifying Nexperia's new site, which is why the teams that got through 2026 intact were the ones holding approvals they had paid for a year earlier.

Is Nexperia itself back to normal?

Partly. Nexperia reported Q2 2026 revenue of 355.6 million dollars, up 18.4 percent on Q1, with the non-China entities profitable, and it has published no date for normal global operations.

Read that revenue figure for what it covers. Chinese entities have been deconsolidated from Nexperia's accounts since 1 October 2025, so the growth describes the non-China business, which is also the business releasing Seremban. Capacity is going up. The legal overhang has not gone anywhere: Wingtech and its Hong Kong subsidiary Yuching filed suit in Guangdong on 23 May 2026 under China's Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law against Nexperia Holding B.V., Nexperia B.V., ITEC B.V. and three Dutch executives, and in August 2026 a court in Dongguan froze up to 2.14 billion yuan, around 300 million dollars, of Nexperia and ITEC assets in China, effective to August 2029. Nexperia says day-to-day operations are unaffected and the case has not been heard on its merits.

The 2025 story is worth one paragraph, because it explains the shape of 2026 without being the cause of it. The Dutch state invoked the Goods Availability Act over Nexperia on 30 September 2025. China restricted exports from Dongguan days later. By late October, Volvo and Volkswagen were warning about plant closures over parts that cost a few cents. China restarted civilian-use shipments on 9 November, and the Dutch order was suspended on 19 November. Trucks moved again. The wound that was still open in September 2026 is paperwork.

What to do before your next MRP run

1. Read the notice, not the summary of it. Get CN-202603019F from Nexperia or your franchised distributor, take the 12NC list and match it line by line against your AVL and your Tier 1 module BOMs. Anything you cannot map, ask your Tier 1 to map for you in writing.

2. Give PCN mail an owner. Five working days of silence is an acceptance nobody in your building decided to give. One named person, one shared mailbox, one rule that every notice gets read the week it lands, costs nothing and prevents the version of this that happens by accident.

3. Split the part number by site inside MRP. Two source-list entries, or two material variants, for as long as one site is approved and the other is in qualification. Warehouse staff should never have to remember a date code rule, because eventually somebody will not.

4. Start the alternate's PPAP before you need it. AEC-Q on a datasheet is a qualification the manufacturer did, not an approval on your line. The gap between those two is the months you spent waiting this year.

5. Cover the qualified gap in the independent channel. When the approved site has stock and the franchised pipe quotes next summer, brokered material closes the distance, and that market is where counterfeit risk concentrates on exactly this kind of cheap, high-volume discrete. Every suspect lot we ship can run our 10-step AS6081 inspection in the Malmö lab under a x2145 microscope. Search our live stock if you want the answer before you send the list.

Holding Nexperia discretes you no longer need?

The mirror image is worth a look. If a redesign or a panic buy in late 2025 left you with uncommitted Nexperia diodes and transistors on Dongguan date codes, those are approved parts on somebody else's approved site, and there are automotive lines still waiting for exactly that. Our excess desk turns that stock into cash on a warranty-backed shelf.

Frequently asked questions

What does Nexperia PCN CN-202603019F change?

It adds ATSN in Seremban, Malaysia as an assembly and test site for parts previously built at ATGD in Dongguan. Issued 13 March 2026, effective 27 March 2026, materials and specifications unchanged, old stock shipped until depleted. The affected part numbers are listed in the notice itself.

How long does a PPAP take on a new assembly site?

Months rather than weeks: supplier documentation, samples on the new site's date codes, capability data, then a signed Part Submission Warrant. Any Tier 1 between you and the OEM repeats the whole sequence on its own account.

Are Diodes, onsemi and Vishay quoting relief?

Not where they overlap Nexperia. Diodes was reported at 40 to 52 weeks in July 2026 with channel inventory below its normal 11 to 14 week band; onsemi's average moved from 27 to 32 weeks in Q2. Vishay is shorter but covers less of the catalogue.

Has Nexperia supply returned to normal?

Physically, for the most part, with Q2 2026 revenue of 355.6 million dollars and the non-China entities profitable. No normalisation date has been published, and a Chinese court froze up to 2.14 billion yuan of its China assets in August 2026.