Renesas To Fully Restore The Performance Of A Chip Factory Affected By A Fire This Month

Renesas Electronics expects to fully restore operations at its key semiconductor manufacturing facility by the end of June. As you know, the plant was damaged in a fire three months ago.

Case N3 at a factory in Naka, which mainly manufactures automotive microcontrollers, was closed after an incident on March 19. A source familiar with the situation said that more than 95% of the plant’s capacity has been restored since its opening in April. Further adjustments are needed to consistently return to pre-fire performance levels.

The fire, along with weather and power outages to factories in Texas, exacerbated a global chip shortage that began in late 2020 and damaged many industries. Earlier and more strongly than others, the automotive sector felt the deficit, since the production of one modern car requires about 1400 semiconductor products.

The Renesas plant, located northeast of Tokyo, was originally expected to recover 50% of its capacity by the end of April and resume operation at full capacity by the end of May, but has actually only reached 88% by then.

The fire damaged many vehicles, which had to be replaced. However, even after replacing the hardware, it takes time to debug. The long production cycle of semiconductor products does not allow to speed up the process.

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