Micron’s Taiwan DRAM fab suffers an hour blackout 

Micron’s DRAM fabrication facility in Taiwan suffered an hour long blackout. The halt in DRAM supply will likely cause the prices to rise.

The factory, called MTTW, produces 10-nm class DRAM. It has a production capacity of 125,000 wafers per month.

The factory accounts for 30% of Micron’s total production capacity. 

Semiconductor production facilities can rack up million dollars in losses even from halts lasting minutes during production. It is because wafers goe through hundreds of processes during production __ even one process gone wrong can jeopardize the  entire batch.

Last year in December, Samsung Electronics’ chip plant in Hwaseong also suffered a blackout of around one to two minutes. This caused the company around 30 billion worth of losses.

In March, 2018, Samsung suffered a blackout that lasted 28 minutes at its plant in Pyeongtaek. This caused around 50 billion won in losses.

It took around two to three days for the South Korean tech giant to recover operations at the two plants. 

The shortage in DRAM may cause prices to rise. According to TrendForce, in November, with DRAM demand recovering and Samsung and SK Hynix supplying less of them, price rose 1% compared to October. The blackout at Micron’s fabrication facility may cause price to rise further than this.

As of 10am on Friday, KST, shares in SK Hynix rose 6.28% compared to the day before and was trading at 118,500 won. Samsung’s share price also rose by 3.3% and was trading at 72,000 won.

In the third quarter of 2020, Samsung has a market share of 41.3% in the worldwide DRAM market, followed by SK Hynix’s 28.2% and Micron’s 25%.