Power outage at Samsung chip factory halts production

Another potentially devastatingly massive loss for Samsung!

"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."



https://en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20191231007200315

ive always wonderd this... if these fabs cost billions to build, do they build some sort of extra capacity at the power plants? or do they even do that? do they just build their own power generation? are backups even possible with this much juice being consumed?

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.

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Doesn't sound like it's a big deal.

It's the 4 soccer fields on the other side of the building that really pull the juice.

And here come the price hikes

Guess the original "accidental power loss" was insufficient to have a positive market price impact. Good thing is this type of "power loss" event has been demonstrated to be reproducible.

With how much real estate they have on their roofs, i'm surprised it's not covered from end to end in solar panels. They appear to be panted blue?

illaghee said:

ive always wonderd this... if these fabs cost billions to build, do they build some sort of extra capacity at the power plants? or do they even do that? do they just build their own power generation? are backups even possible with this much juice being consumed?

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Yes backup power is definitely possible. Probably some simple large diesel generators. Maybe even small turbines.

However.... here's where the unknowns come in. My guess is that without constant uninterrupted power, it wouldn't really matter as the current production run may be lost. That would require uninterruptible power meaning batteries - and a lot of them. Backup generators take several minutes to start, get up to speed and rearch 60Hz so that the breaker may be closed. With multiple generators, they would all have to be in sync but that's not really a big deal.

What I'm getting at is that their power load is likely enormous. The cost of battery backup and enough generator capacity to keep running would be insane at best. Might just be a case of installing and maintaining the backup is more expensive than losses from power outages.

And yes I'm speculating here. This is just an educated guess.

GiGaBiTe said:

With how much real estate they have on their roofs, i'm surprised it's not covered from end to end in solar panels. They appear to be panted blue?

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With the yearly cyclone and monsoon seasons they'll have to replace those panels regularly.

Funny how we always have these convenient issues to put up memory prices again...

GiGaBiTe said:

With how much real estate they have on their roofs, i'm surprised it's not covered from end to end in solar panels. They appear to be panted blue?

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The article says this photo is of a different chip plant - its not the one affected by the power outage.

theonedub said:

And here come the price hikes

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Just bought a 2TB drive so I'm good. Wouldn't mind a price hike so I can offload old drives on ebay for more than they were worth.

THRESHIN said:

Yes backup power is definitely possible. Probably some simple large diesel generators. Maybe even small turbines.

However.... here's where the unknowns come in. My guess is that without constant uninterrupted power, it wouldn't really matter as the current production run may be lost. That would require uninterruptible power meaning batteries - and a lot of them. Backup generators take several minutes to start, get up to speed and rearch 60Hz so that the breaker may be closed. With multiple generators, they would all have to be in sync but that's not really a big deal.

What I'm getting at is that their power load is likely enormous. The cost of battery backup and enough generator capacity to keep running would be insane at best. Might just be a case of installing and maintaining the backup is more expensive than losses from power outages.

And yes I'm speculating here. This is just an educated guess.

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It's not even that hard they could ues flywheels and ups to power the plant for the under a minute it takes some types of fast starting/syncing generators to start and be ready for a load. Also I bet thiers only a few parts of the run that has to have 100% up time to avoid form being ruined.
(Backround years ago we installed 2 750kw uints at an oil refinery and they would be synced up raday to power the plant in about a minute)



This is price fixing 100%

THRESHIN said:

Yes backup power is definitely possible. Probably some simple large diesel generators. Maybe even small turbines.

However.... here's where the unknowns come in. My guess is that without constant uninterrupted power, it wouldn't really matter as the current production run may be lost. That would require uninterruptible power meaning batteries - and a lot of them. Backup generators take several minutes to start, get up to speed and rearch 60Hz so that the breaker may be closed. With multiple generators, they would all have to be in sync but that's not really a big deal.

What I'm getting at is that their power load is likely enormous. The cost of battery backup and enough generator capacity to keep running would be insane at best. Might just be a case of installing and maintaining the backup is more expensive than losses from power outages.

And yes I'm speculating here. This is just an educated guess.

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The costs for proper power protections would certainly be high, but they'd still be an order of magnitude shy of "insane." When the cost of every outage starts at $10MM, goes up from there, and happens on at least an annual basis, multi-million dollar spends on backups become significant cost savers.

Now, the catch here is that the cost savings really apply only to instances where they need to hit production numbers in order to maintain customers. I'd imagine the facilities which do work for Apple have perfect power protection. For commodity items, like SSD chips, where a sudden decrease in supply leads to an overcompensating spike in pricing, each "unexpected" power outage might actually end up being net positive due to the price spike. For that stuff, having anything beyond some battery powered emergency exit lights is probably overkill.

Most fabs have multiple power sources/lines coming in. Then key equipment is also on uninterupted systems that are supposed to be much better than ups. But somehow they all still manage to fail. Often it turns out to be the switch or something worse. Not the actual power source cutting off. At worse a small dip in one power source is detected, another source is automatically drawn on to prevent the tools from seeing the dip and something goes wrong killing 2 lines at once. Even then they usually have 2 or more additional lines to pull from, just then they have to do manual rerouting and it definitely causes tools to have to be re-qualled + some material will be lost.

Note all fabs pay a huge amount of money to support their systems. And the don't skimp on cost here. (Power loss is usually not covered by the vendors, so it extra out of pocket costs to get the tools recovers + fix whatever light sources, etc that might have gone bad from either a power swing, or unsafe power loss.)

Backup Power Systems didn't kick in properly more than likely. UPS bank should have been in place until the diesel/gas backup generators take over.

A few of these should do the trick, each about a 1000 times what typical home users need.
Galaxy VX 1000kVA Scalable to 1500kVA

Chapter 5 - Semiconductor Business Continuity Solutions


"Devices such as automatic transfer switches (ATS), uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and diesel or natural gas generators all play an important role in these backup schemes. An ATS can reroute the flow of power based on preconfigured rules so that power can continue to flow despite changes in the power infrastructure. A UPS senses when the mains power gets cuts and the internal circuitry is fast enough to temporarily assume the power load in a way that downstream devices are not affected. The UPS then uses the power stored in its batteries to act as a temporary bridge until power to the mains is restored or until gas and/or diesel generators can be fired up to support the load (until the mains power is restored). "