Samsung DRAM and NAND plant shut down for up to three days due to power outage as short as one minute
A power failure at a Samsung Electronics factory disrupted production of semiconductors on Tuesday, industry sources said. They said the power outage that lasted about a minute at the factory in Hwaseong, about 60 kilometers southwest of Seoul, brought production of DRAM and NAND flash chips to a stop.
The world's largest memory chipmaker said it will likely take two to three days to restart production, and said that damage from the temporary stoppage will not be too serious.
According to the company, the outage occurred when power transmission cable at a nearby substation exploded, which cut off power in the neighborhood around the factory. Samsung suffered some 50 billion won (US$43.3 million) in damages last year when a power outage affected its chip factory in Pyeongtaek in southern Gyeonggi Province. The estimated amount of damage from Tuesday's incident is a likely to be in the few billion won range.
Samsung campus in Hwaseong
Samsung to Release a truly Bezel-less TV at CES - 12/31/2019 08:45 AM
Samsung Electronics will introduce its premium, bezel-less TV at the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2020....
Samsung TVs Get First 8K HDMI 2.1 Certification - 12/27/2019 09:34 AM
I agree it is a little far fetched (8K), but Samsung certainly is pushing it. Samsung Electronics has received the industry's first 8K HDMI 2.1 video standard certification for its 2019 and 2020 TVs....
Samsung researchers found a way for QLED technology to not use backlights - 11/29/2019 01:43 PM
In their ongoing effort to get closer to OLED technology (which is patented by LG) Samsung researchers have found a way to make the company's QPLED technology behave more like OLEDs....
Samsung Announces Galaxy Note10+ Star Wars Special Edition - 11/19/2019 08:46 AM
Samsung today announced a special edition Galaxy Note10+ in advance of the December 20 release of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. Special edition will be ready for launch in advance of the December ...
Samsung fights off damage from contaminated DRAM semiconductor devices - 11/11/2019 08:33 AM
In a report from BusinessKorea is has become apparent that Samsung suffers from significant damage in its foundry industry. Equipment for the fabrication of its chips, which could have an effect for t...
Member
Posts: 80
Joined: 2009-10-01
Please go take a job as a risk management director in the semiconductor industry so that you can realize that you have no idea what you're talking about. Nobody runs whole building UPS on this scale in developed countries. It's ridiculously expensive and the risk simply isn't great enough to merit it. You would need to have consistent outages every year for it to even begin to make financial sense. And the SK grid is just not unreliable enough to justify that.
Senior Member
Posts: 722
Joined: 2014-02-23
This is the natural consequence of Samsung price fixing and lying multiple times throughout the years.
Junior Member
Posts: 7
Joined: 2019-11-06
I worked on a huge data center design 10 years ago, they had dual redundancy measures for both telecommunications and power from "separate" companies. They don't "kick in" like a UPS as they are always on and if any one point fails it just carries on working from the dual stream. Of course all the main hardware inside the date center was designed for dual power/comms too.
Conspiracy theory or not, my assumption that the worlds largest multi trillion dollar chip plant is not capable of delivering sustained power for a 1 minute stretch is a little hard to believe. Especially as this has happened before and is not an unreasonable risk to mitigate.
Senior Member
Posts: 1686
Joined: 2013-11-08
I work in the semiconductor industry growing compound semiconductor crystals and we also have on site cutting and polishing of wafers, honestly even smallest blip in power can cause massive delays in production, whether it's losing the growth of a crystal or having melt back a partially grown crystal that now isn't within spec to start again, this will put you back either several hours or in the case of a complete loss of a crystal several days.
Crystals aren't a simple case of load the material into the puller, push a button and off it goes, it can often take several attempts to grow a single crystal over several days and sometimes weeks.
Cutting the crystal, making sure wafers are in spec and polishing them is also extremely delicate and time consuming work, any interruption in power can lose entire crystals during cutting, and several hundred wafers during polishing.
Having UPS's on everything really isn't an option, they're good enough to keep the control consoles active, but you simply can't have enough of them to keep an entire site active, these machines pull serious power.
Senior Member
Posts: 3349
Joined: 2014-10-20
A serious roof leak could stop manufacturing for MONTHS easily. A significant leak could quickly destroy billions of dollars of custom built equipment. It's not quite as simple as getting one day day amazon shipping and plugging it back in....
As anyone who has actually used them can confirm backup generators are not guaranteed to work reliably enough or kick in fast enough for something like this. They are designed to help with long term outages. For short term you need a whole building UPS. Of course this is a moot point to begin with since we don't even know if they even had backup generators but of course that never stopped this community from beginning wild speculations about things that they have no information about or even any background in.
I couldn't care less. They make billions, and can't afford BOTH active generators and UPS? I don't buy it.
All of those are lies aimed at further inflating the prices.