Slashdot Mirror
Power Outage At Samsung's Fab Destroys 3.5 Percent of Global NAND Flash Output (anandtech.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AnandTech: A half-hour power outage at Samsung's fab near Pyeongtaek, South Korea, disrupted production and damaged tens of thousands of processed wafers. Media reports claim that the outage destroyed as much as 3.5% of the global NAND supply for March, which may have an effect on flash memory pricing in the coming weeks. The outage happened on March 9 and lasted for about 30 minutes, according to a news story from Taiwain-based TechNews that cites further South Korean reports. The report claims that the outage damaged 50,000 to 60,000 of wafers with V-NAND flash memory, which represent 11% of Samsung's monthly output. The report further estimates that the said amount equates to approximately 3.5% of global NAND output, but does not elaborate whether it means wafer output or bit output. Samsung uses its fab near Pyeongtaek to produce 64-layer V-NAND chips used for various applications. The fab is among the largest flash production facilities in the world and therefore any disruption there has an effect on the global output of non-volatile memory. Meanwhile, since production lines have not been damaged and the fab is back online, the significance of such an effect is limited.
all the hard drives crashed at the FLASH memory assembly line?
That's a lot of silicon chips. A lot of robots will go hungry this month.
Captcha: blackout (no kidding)
Just as prices were getting low.
I remember when a ram plant caught on fire a long time ago. Ram prices went through the roof. No video or pictures that 'event' either. A quick google search yielded very little on this disaster. Most of what I found was from a battery fire in 2017.
North Korean industrial sabotage?
This supply chain disaster will result in prices increasing, where they'll remain for years to come, long after production is back to normal.
More likely it was storms or squirrels or changes.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
And starve miners of cards to the point mining is unprofitable so cards can go back to normal usage.
You'd think that the potential of losing 50K+ wafers could justify some pretty magnificent UPSs - even Tesla Powerpacks throughout if the power requirements need something like that. Surely they at least have multiple redundant generators. Since multibillion dollar factories think of things like this - has anyone found details of what really happened? It has to be a comedy of errors of some type.
I assume there will be some spectacular deals on high capacity USB drives from less-than-honorable merchants on Amazon in the next couple weeks.
If you didn't understand any of the abbreviates or acronyms then this isn't the site for you.
I've never seen pictures of you, so I'm reasonably sure that you're merely one of Alex Jones' AI chatbots and can be safely ignored.
BTW: Don't bother linking to a picture. I know about Photoshop, you sneaky bot you...
Fab is a common term of art for a facility that produces chips.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I’m curious how loss of power would destroy already-fabbed wafers. Do they need to be kept in conditions that require power to maintain or something?
No, it's slashdot - news for nerds. If you ever had nerd credentials, they are hereby revoked for not knowing that the common vernacular for a microchip fabrication plant is "fab".
Pyongyang
Here is a photo of the blackout.
#DeleteFacebook
Here's a photo of a fab.
#DeleteFacebook
That's a fake. If it were really a picture of the blackout, there would be stars visible in the sky.
Fab - short for âoeFabricationâ
With such a dire consequences, they might have implemented a back up power system. What happened to that? Wow!
The only thing I can think of is the power disruption led to some sort of contamination. However with Fukishima, the problem wasn't the age of the plant but the design was not meant to handle both an earthquake and a 50ft tsunami at the same time.
The design worked well as soon as the earthquake hit, all reactors were immediate put into shutdown mode. The earthquake also hit the power grid but the diesel generators kicked in. The problem was that it would take about 24 hours of active cooling to get the reactors down to a temperature where it would be stable. Then the tsumani hit and at 50ft breached the 20ft seawall. All the cooling pumps, generators, and electrical equipment were hit located in the basement which were flooded. No cooling and no power and no instrumentation.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
In countries that the Greens have ruined, or prevented from industrializing in the first place, they keep claiming that all needed power can come from the sun and the wind. The reasoning is that if your urban economy is "post-industrial" a shop that consists of software developers can just knock off and go to the pub when the wind stops blowing at a time when there happens to not be enough sunshine.
But post-industrial countries can exist only when they can import the products of heavy industry from places like South Korea, where the heavy industries for which continuous power is crucial can run off a 24/7 nuclear grid. Those are the only countries where that Samsung fab could even be located.
I have. I was IN a fab that lost complete power for several hours at a time once, largely due to human error. It took us weeks to recover our factory to normal operation.
...an accident happens in a Samsung Fab, and nothing catches fire ?!?
Since I forgot to mention details, it was one of STMicroelectronics's fabs in Phoenix, AZ, January 2009. Total blackout due to human error, fab was without power for 4 hours.
Elon's got your UPS, it's a bit spendy but hopefully they will get some custom versions for fab plants, hospitals, etc...
140 milliseconds... not bad for 100 megawatts...
http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/thats-a-record-south-australias-tesla-battery-responds-to-coalfired-plant-failure/news-story/d9e02c0dbf6774ffea948a1b919f3b7f
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
In the industry you cannot afford to stockpile millions of dollars worth of equipment just in case. It's cheaper long run to absorb the price increases (it's not like there will be nothing available) than to sit on aging stock.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
All these replies and not one mentioning a "Semiconductor fabrication plant"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We did have out battery supplier lose their entire factory to a fire, forcing us to delay our own products until while we searched for and adapted to a different battery vendor. So the stuff does happen. Those guys weren't raising prices though, they had no product to sell.
Similarly, there was a shortgage of one processor we were using, and the explanation was that the fabs were all overbooked. As in all the big name suppliers of small embedded MCUs were in the same boat. It could have been lying, but some digging showed that there were indeed extremely long lead times for the competitors as well.
With you.
Damaged flash memory? Never heard of it.
Typically what comes out of a fab is wafers. They will be cut and packaged elsewhere.
please don't tell slashdot what to write in it's stories. this is NOT twitter
You would not stockpile, you would enlarge your queue of parts.
This is exactly what Iâ(TM)m thinking. It seems funny that theyâ(TM)d not have banks of back up batteries when there is such a high risk associated with it.
Fab is short for fabrication. AKA a chip fab our foundry. Since that is what factories that make cpu chips and memory are called in the tech industry lingo.
I've never heard of a FAB losing production due to a power loss
I have never heard of an industry that has not at some point lost production due to a power loss. I'm going to assume you spend too much time living in a cage.
No video or pictures that 'event' either.
I know right! Last time the power went out at my work costing many millions of dollars per day of outage my first reaction too was that I need to go and get a photography permit filled out, get the plant manager to sign it and take a photo! /facetous.
They certainly have. The cost of this incident will be enormous. This is very likely human error. Some idiot here switched off the power to the 2 datacenters running airspace surveillance, closing the airspace for more than a day. It also had backup power facilities...
10 seconds of power loss is still fatal to wafers in process. Toshiba had a power loss of *70 milliseconds* at a fab in December 2010, that caused material loss and a measurable drop in flash output in the following two months.
I misread at first glance.
Wow, those sure are some high-tech chips!
This is a Fab: https://s3-eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/centaur-wp/designweek/prod/content/uploads/2017/04/12162050/Just-Fab-Lolly2-768x349.jpg
NO I AM NOT BOT. BEEP BOP!
70 ms isn't a heck of a lot. To put it in perspective, at 60Hz, 1 cycle is 16.7ms (at 50Hz, 20ms). That means the fab lost power for a mere 3.5-4.25 cycles of AC power.
Most UPSes that aren't online ones switch within 2 cycles (that gives it time for it to detect the failure and switch on the inverter, let it stabilize and switch over)
There's a reason why fabs are located in places where the country is highly advanced - the power requirements are extremely high. At a lot of these places, the term "power outage" actually doesn't make sense - the population have never experienced more than a brief flicker of light. Electricity has always and will always work, barring local problems.
'At a lot of these places, the term "power outage" actually doesn't make sense - the population have never experienced more than a brief flicker of light. '
And yet they still build fabs in the USA.