Power chip maker Onsemi’s fab in South Korea suffered a power outage on Sunday, TheElec learned on Thursday.
The fab based at Bucheon was out of power for around 20 minutes starting at 9:30 pm local time on Sunday.
The company’s fab was a victim of a wide outage that affected some areas of the cities around the same time.
Most equipment was impacted by the outage as few had uninterruptible power supplies, sources said.
The fab runs S1, S2, S3, and S4 production lines that manufacture silicon carbide-based MOSFET and silicon IGBTs.
Onsemi recently built a fifth line called S5 and is setting up equipment to expand SiC chip production.
Power outage is critical to fabs as most wafers that were being processed can’t be reused.
It also takes considerable time to reset the production lines. Sources said Onsemi has recently reactivated the equipment and doing test runs of its lines.
Back in 2021, Samsung said it suffered a financial loss of up to 400 billion won when its fab in Austin, Texas suffered a similar power outage.
However, Onsemi’s fab in Bucheon is considerably smaller and the power outage was short, so the financial damage is likely much smaller.
An Onsemi executive told TheElec said economic damage was minimal and that starting on Monday it worked for two days to normalize its fab.
Meanwhile, Onsemi is considering shutting down its Bucheon fab for two weeks in December due to the global chip downturn.
