On Friday, there was big news out of Japan when one of Toshiba's semiconductor plants that manufactures DRAMs suffered a power outage that was described as being only .07 seconds in length. Some of the story does not make sense to us as supposedly the 'outage was more severe than the backup systems could handle.' The IAC team at VDC is currently in the process of publishing our study of power protection products so this story was of great interest. Here are a few thoughts I had about the subject:
- Toshiba makes UPS systems although the largest is in the 750kVA range which can handle a few pieces of semiconductor processing equipment but not an entire facility. If Toshiba's power protection architecture was plant wide, it would likely involve large mega (MVA) UPS and diesel / gas generators as well.
- The Nishishiba subsidiary that Toshiba acquired in 2008 makes Motor - Generator (MG) sets that would also tend to handle .07 second outages although these systems are primarily used as a method of generating power frequencies other than what is supplied by the local grid.
- Large facilities often have multiple power systems with some that can tolerate small outages (think lights/AC) and others that are highly protected for IT servers and, in Toshiba's case, semiconductor processing Equipment. UPS systems are usually employed as a intermediary measure on highly protected power lines to allow a smooth transition to backup generators or in less critical applications allow a orderly shutdown of the protected device.
- The Toshiba case, sounds like there was a switching or startup delay between The grid power to UPS or the UPS to the generator system. To me, this event sounds like there had to have been a "perfect storm" of circumstances with some components of the power protection system failing or being down for maintenance.
- If anything, this whole event underscores the importance of having power protection on any kind of industrial facility where power interruptions can result in unsafe conditions and/or a significant loss of material being processed. As I have 30 years of semiconductor industry experience, I will make some observations here. I have never been there and I don't have any guidance but I am assuming that this Toshiba plant was doing test as well as fabrication.
- Any wafers that were undergoing chemical processes were likely ruined.
- Some quantity of semiconductor testers will need to have channels cards replaced as these units are packed with extremely high speed electronic devices that have to be powered up and down in a very controlled sequence. At a minimum, it takes a few hours for things to be turned back on, achieve temperature stability, perform calibration, and then have the lot set up again for production.
- As we are talking wafer testing instead of packaged devices, there is a good chance that the very expensive probe systems were damaged as well.
- Toshiba was estimating a 20% loss of product shipments for the quarter and I believe them. Industrial plant managers will often compare the price of protection systems against the cost and liklihood of a power failure event. In light of this well publicized event, these calculations should be re-visited if the initial decision was to accept the risk. As a last note, the actual costs for Toshiba will also include a loss of future business as competitors will fill some of the missing supply and customers split future orders between suppliers to avoid single source risk.
In conclusion, Toshiba's DRAM business loss is actually a gain for their and other suppliers industrial UPS business as many orders might be driven by the publication of this event.
On a last somewhat ironic closing note. Toshiba might take some solace in knowing that during the research for the Power Protection report, one of our Analysts contacted a supplier of Surge protection products and found that they could not give us some data as they had planned because some of their servers were down after the building they were in was hit by lightning. If this trend continues, I fear for some of the suppliers we will be contacting for our Functional Safety report.
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