
Samsung Power Outage Kills 3.5% Of Global Flash For March - ce4
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-power-outage-flash-pyeongtaek,36670.html
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sevensor
Numbers are a little suspect. Capacity is 120k, and they say up to 60k
damaged? Inventory being what it is, they're doing great if they have half the
wafers in process at any given time. So if there's a power bump, 60k is an
absolute maximum. Furthermore, almost none of these lots are a dead loss. The
ones in diffusion furnaces and wet hoods are likely 100% scrap, but CMP, CVD,
implant, and dry etch mostly process one wafer at a time. Some of the wafers
may be dusted by vacuum loss, but that's usually recoverable. Most photo
layers give you redos -- strip off the resist and try again. I'd estimate the
actual scrap from this event at no more than 10k wafers. The rest will be
delayed production, but not a dead loss.

Edit: oops, I left out metals and test. Metals is a chamber process, wafers in
process will be killed but unlikely it's the whole lot. You can lose wafers at
test if they're in burn-in or being lasered.

Edit: I confused capacity and monthly output. My numbers are probably 3-4x low
in terms of total impact on production, although they're likely reasonable in
terms of their effect on one month's worth of output. 60k still seems like an
overstatement.

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cosmie
The numbers aren't suspect, the journalist just segued into a second topic
without being clear.

The outage happened at the Pyeongtaek plant, which according to Wikipedia has
capacity of 450,000 chips per month[1]. Making the maximum estimated damage
only 13% of monthly production capacity, not 50%.

The Xi'an plant is a completely different plan, which is beginning an
expansion at the end of the month that should add 200k/month of additional
capacity at that plant. Nifty fact, but not immediately relevant to the outage
that happened.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants)

~~~
sevensor
Ah, good point, I was confusing capacity with monthly output. 3-4x sounds
about right.

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mud_dauber
A 30-minute downtime? I'm surprised there's no mention of backup generator
capacity. I assumed this is a requirement for all fabs?

