According to Tom’s Hardware, Samsung has been ordered to completely shut down two of its chip factories in Texas due to power shortages in the state. This also affected NXP Semiconductors, Infineon Semiconductors and other companies. The state utility company Austin Energy, which supplies electricity to the city of Austin, has ordered all industrial and semiconductor manufacturers to suspend or close their facilities. Moreover, all companies complied with this order.
Unplanned production stoppages can have long-term consequences, such as a thirty-minute power outage in 2018 at a Samsung factory that cut global NAND supply by 3%. In addition, it may take several days for the factory to return to full operation after power is restored.
The source adds that some products may have been damaged as a result of power outages in factories. This could cost the affected companies millions of dollars in losses. Certain types of microcircuits can take a month or more to go through various stages of production, and unplanned power outages can destroy entire batches of unfinished products. It is not known at this time if Samsung was notified prior to the power outage in order to gently shut down operations in its factories and minimize the impact, as well as quickly resume normal operations after power returns.
This is very bad news given the ongoing global shortage of chips. Chip factories have back-up power generators for unplanned outages, but these systems are usually designed for short periods of time to provide soft shutdowns and are not suitable for extended outages. Samsung built its first factory in Austin in 1996, and opened a second factory in 2007, which was expanded in 2017. Samsung plans to build a $ 17 billion new factory in the US this year.
The states of Texas, Oregon and Virginia are experiencing abnormally low temperatures for these territories, while icing is reported on about 50% of wind turbines in Texas. As a result, more than 1.8 million consumers were disconnected from the power supply network. In fact, the enterprises took away electricity in order to give it to people.
The date of the resumption of normal operation has not yet been announced.
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