Power Outage at Samsung Destroys 3.5% of Global NAND Flash Output For March

Dekoth-E- said:
This statement hits far too close to home. I've done so much contract It work and I've lost count of how many places I've walked in where the UPS's were all beeping and someone mentioned they had been doing that for years completely oblivious to the implications.
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Or could be like me sitting here with new batteries in a box and cursing every time the power goes out and swearing, ok that's the last time, now where's the screwdriver (and then the power comes back on ;) ).
 
I remember when the local ford plant lost power. Time to cut all the engine blocks out of the arc furnaces....
 
rgMekanic said:
A power outage at a Samsung fab near Pyeongtaek, South Korea is being reported by AnandTech. The half hour power outage reportedly damaged 50,000 to 60,000 wafers of V-NAND memory, which represent 11% of Samsung's monthly output, and 3.5% of the global NAND output.

Ugh, if the enthusiast PC market didn't need yet another slap across its face right now. We will have to see what happens in the market, or else we may need to add NAND storage to the ever growing list of things that are running at inflated pricing. I wonder if the power outage was caused by miners using up all the electricity? Big thank you to WhoBeDaPlaya for the story.

Samsung itself has already produced volumes of its latest Galaxy S9/S9+ smartphones it needed to support channel sales in the coming months, therefore it is not going to require massive amounts of NAND memory in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, other major consumers of NAND will start to build up inventory of memory only later this year when they start to prep for product launches in August or September.
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should have bought a CAT with that... as in one of these

https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/...n/diesel-generator-sets/3074593387660138.html

What is I'll take 14MW in an emergency, Alex
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
should have bought a CAT with that... as in one of these

https://www.cat.com/en_US/products/...n/diesel-generator-sets/3074593387660138.html

What is I'll take 14MW in an emergency, Alex
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Ya that won't do the trick. You are talking in the range of 50-100MW. So at a minimum you'd need 5 of those, remember that the spec they are giving is engine power, not electrical generation, that is less (the 14MW model maybe generates 10-11MW of electricity). On top of that, you are going to need a whole hell of a lot of batteries. Engines that big don't start fast, so you will need to be able to keep things operational for a bit before it is ready to go. That's a rather hard thing to make happen, and expensive as well.

If you don't think that shit like this was considered, you are kidding yourself. Fabs are expensive projects and they have really smart people design them. But as with anything in business, cost vs risk always has to be considered. Is building your own powerplant worth it, or do you just make sure you have really reliable grid connections? Even if you do build your own powerplant, who says that doesn't fail? Backups fail, sometimes generators won't start. So do you build a backup to your backup? At what point does the amount spent become really stupid and not worth it?

These are questions asked and answered when they designed these things.
 
Sycraft said:
Ya that won't do the trick. You are talking in the range of 50-100MW. So at a minimum you'd need 5 of those, remember that the spec they are giving is engine power, not electrical generation, that is less (the 14MW model maybe generates 10-11MW of electricity). On top of that, you are going to need a whole hell of a lot of batteries. Engines that big don't start fast, so you will need to be able to keep things operational for a bit before it is ready to go. That's a rather hard thing to make happen, and expensive as well.

If you don't think that shit like this was considered, you are kidding yourself. Fabs are expensive projects and they have really smart people design them. But as with anything in business, cost vs risk always has to be considered. Is building your own powerplant worth it, or do you just make sure you have really reliable grid connections? Even if you do build your own powerplant, who says that doesn't fail? Backups fail, sometimes generators won't start. So do you build a backup to your backup? At what point does the amount spent become really stupid and not worth it?

These are questions asked and answered when they designed these things.
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that's fine.... the more the merrier... the point was there are diesel gensets that can power rather large electrical loads. it would be no problem to string 6-20 of those things together to power something...and they may have considered it, but they did not give it much thought... just like the Fukushima guys that put their gensets in the basement... jus' saying...
 
Sycraft said:
Ya that won't do the trick. You are talking in the range of 50-100MW. So at a minimum you'd need 5 of those, remember that the spec they are giving is engine power, not electrical generation, that is less (the 14MW model maybe generates 10-11MW of electricity). On top of that, you are going to need a whole hell of a lot of batteries. Engines that big don't start fast, so you will need to be able to keep things operational for a bit before it is ready to go. That's a rather hard thing to make happen, and expensive as well.

If you don't think that shit like this was considered, you are kidding yourself. Fabs are expensive projects and they have really smart people design them. But as with anything in business, cost vs risk always has to be considered. Is building your own powerplant worth it, or do you just make sure you have really reliable grid connections? Even if you do build your own powerplant, who says that doesn't fail? Backups fail, sometimes generators won't start. So do you build a backup to your backup? At what point does the amount spent become really stupid and not worth it?

These are questions asked and answered when they designed these things.
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Backup power doesn't necessarily need to power the entire fab, how about just supplying enough juice that chips don't get fucked up when the power goes out?
 
The massive quantities of salt memory prices are producing has posters here thinking they’re smarter than the people who design and run fabs that cost many billions of dollars and produce product valued in the tens of millions of dollars per day. Get a grip.
 
rgMekanic said:
Backup power doesn't necessarily need to power the entire fab, how about just supplying enough juice that chips don't get fucked up when the power goes out?
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Anyone in the Fab business will tell you that that really isn't feasible. Sometimes just a few cycles of power loss interrupting the process is enough to scrap wafers
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
that's fine.... the more the merrier... the point was there are diesel gensets that can power rather large electrical loads. it would be no problem to string 6-20 of those things together to power something...and they may have considered it, but they did not give it much thought... just like the Fukushima guys that put their gensets in the basement... jus' saying...
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No they gave it a lot of thought. The cost of the backup is more than the expected loss times the expected number of losses. Power backup would likely have host them 100+ million just in initial cost and millions per year in maintenance. They have enough backup power to safe shutdown machines (which are where the real costs are), but saving wafers in process at the time? Not worth the cost. Simple doesn't make economic sense nor is there another critical risk reason that they cannot just stop manufacturing and shatter now dead wafers.

rgMekanic said:
Backup power doesn't necessarily need to power the entire fab, how about just supplying enough juice that chips don't get fucked up when the power goes out?
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Things that aren't process critical don't really use all that much power (HVAC is primarily filtration/movement, ferry system is pretty low power, lights). 90%+ of power use is direct processing power.
 
gobnu1 said:
Anyone in the Fab business will tell you that that really isn't feasible. Sometimes just a few cycles of power loss interrupting the process is enough to scrap wafers
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I completely agree that depending on where something is in production it can not be saved, but lowering the number shouldnt be impossible
 
Dekoth-E- said:
This statement hits far too close to home. I've done so much contract It work and I've lost count of how many places I've walked in where the UPS's were all beeping and someone mentioned they had been doing that for years completely oblivious to the implications.
Click to expand...
What's worse is when you walk into some office with 50-100 employees running off of what appears to be someone's game rig from the Athlon K7 era, a 10/100 based network with a Linksys WRT54G and no UPS. The reason you are there is because their desktops are not logging in. The reason they are not logging in is because that former game box turned server is their AD/Exchange/Blackberry/Fileserver and it's completely out of disk space. "You don't have anything important on this do you?"... "well it has all our case files, accounting information and such"... because they are a law firm. There is so much I don't miss from running an IT consulting and MSP company.
 
rgMekanic said:
I completely agree that depending on where something is in production it can not be saved, but lowering the number shouldnt be impossible
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At these size scales and process control, it's unfortunately not like they can measure where they were in their respective processes and just "fudge" them back to working like we'd try to do in research/academic fabs. :) Any etch/dep step in flight is a seriously dead wafer because you really only have one shot. Stuff in litho might be recoverable, but not sure if the extra clean step (depending on where the wafer is) will fall out of compliance. It may be simpler to pitch everything and start from the top again.
 
EchtoGammut said:
What's worse is when you walk into some office with 50-100 employees running off of what appears to be someone's game rig from the Athlon K7 era, a 10/100 based network with a Linksys WRT54G and no UPS. The reason you are there is because their desktops are not logging in. The reason they are not logging in is because that former game box turned server is their AD/Exchange/Blackberry/Fileserver and it's completely out of disk space. "You don't have anything important on this do you?"... "well it has all our case files, accounting information and such"... because they are a law firm. There is so much I don't miss from running an IT consulting and MSP company.
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This actually gave me PTSD flashbacks of several clients who had damn near this exact scenario and wanted me to perform a miracle on a completely unrealistic deadline.
 
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