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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?
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.
This supply chain disaster will result in prices increasing, where they'll remain for years to come, long after production is back to normal.
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.
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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?
I think it's safe to assume they had backup power and it didn't cut in. We had that exact problem at work last year - the UPS gets tested monthly along with the genny, but the transfer switch does NOT, and of course that didn't work when it needed to. So our genny started right up after some yutz hit a pole outside our building, purring happily while we were running the datacenter on a large UPS (30 minute runtime, normally only needed for about 40 seconds to start and stabilize the genny, switch to it from mains) We had no idea the genny hadn't transferred over until the UPS's batteries were nearly exhausted and we started getting additional warnings. By then it was too late to do an orderly on most of our servers too, and the racks lost power abruptly. :P
A few months later the idiot doing our genny maintenance forgot to put the fuel cap back on the gas tank, and guess what won't start if the fuel tank pressure is wrong? (can't say I was aware of that either!) So we had a power loss, and... why isn't the genny starting? At least we caught that one early, 25 was more than enough in that case to give everything the orderly.
The only time you get a complete power systems test is if you throw the mains breaker manually. (or more intelligently, have a hot-cut unit installed to save wear on the breakers) And very few places actually DO that kind of test.
I'd be interested to know what exactly was the mode of loss. I assume air handlers that maintain superclean air in all the places such a fab need them to had stopped running, requiring them to open doors and turn on fans etc, and it just plain contaminated the batch from one end of the line to the other.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Here is a photo of the blackout.
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I work at Intel. Our fabs are comparable to Samsung's fabs in terms of equipment and scale. Ain't no UPS in the world that can keep a fab up and running if a blackout hits, even with backup generators. Most fabs are extremely sensitive to power glitches that last mere seconds, nevermind for a half hour.
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.
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.
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