A’natural disaster’ hit the global semiconductor industry, which is struggling with’short supply’. In the aftermath of the US cold wave and the Japanese earthquake, major semiconductor factories were shut down one after another (temporarily suspended). Plants that have stopped contain a number of lines that produce semiconductors for vehicles that have recently been in short supply. There are concerns that the semiconductor supply and demand crisis will intensify.
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According to foreign media on the 17th, the Samsung Electronics foundry (semiconductor consignment production) plant in Austin, Texas, stopped production due to a cut in power supply due to a local cold wave. The Austin plant produces chips from Intel, Tesla, Xilinx, and IBM at 14nm (nanometer, 1nm = 1 billionth of a meter) and 28nm lines. This is due to the request of the city of Austin to’stop factory operation’ from semiconductor companies such as Samsung Electronics due to power outages and power shortages. The factory stopped at 4 pm on the 16th local time (7 am on the 17th Korean time).
Blackouts do not small damage to semiconductor factories. It may be necessary to discard some wafers on the production line. In 2018, when the Pyeongtaek semiconductor plant was shut down for 30 minutes due to a fire, it incurred a loss of about 50 billion won. A power outage occurred during the operation of the factory, and the effect of disposing of all the semiconductors in the line was large.
Samsung Electronics explained that this blackout was not a’sudden shock’. A company official said, “According to the prior notice of Austin, the operation was stopped after preparation work,” and “the damage is not great.” However, if the cold wave continues for a long time, delivery delays and line repair costs are expected due to production disruptions.
The plant, which was shut down at the request of the city of Austin, also included the production facility of NXP, the world’s number one semiconductor company. At NXP’s Austin factory, it produces microcontrollers (microcontrollers), power semiconductors, and sensors.
The earthquake that occurred in the northeastern part of Japan on the 13th is also acting as a’bad disaster’ in the supply and demand of semiconductors for vehicles. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the world’s third-largest automotive semiconductor company, Renesas’ Naka plant, shut down on the 14th, and the wafers started to be put in again on the 16th. It is known that Shin-Etsu’s Shirakawa plant, which manufactures wafers, which is a raw material for semiconductors, also ceased operations on the 14th and is sequentially restarting production.
Unimicron, a Taiwanese ABF substrate manufacturer, was hit by fire. The Unimicron plant in northern Taiwan caught fire on the 5th of this month following last October. The ABF board is a component used to connect the semiconductor chip and the main board of electronic devices. Analysis says that supply disruptions of ABF substrates are expected for more than 6 months. Companies that design and sell CPUs (central processing units) and smart phone APs (application processors) that require ABF boards are in an emergency. An official in the semiconductor industry analyzed that “there was a natural disaster while companies were striving to increase production,” and “the impact will not be small.”
Reporter Hwang Jeong-soo [email protected]
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