Samsung has lost tens of thousands of NAND wafers after one of its fabrication plants in Pyeongtaek, Korea, suffered from a power outage. The situation lasted for approximately half an hour, causing the machinery inside the plant to shut down.
While a half hour power outage may seem like a small thing to the normal consumer, a power outage in an environment that operates high-end machinery can result in a catastrophic situation.
In Samsung’s case; the plant is populated with state of the art hardware that creates circuitry and wafers that are too small for the naked eye to see. When the power outage occurred, Samsung tallied the total number of NAND wafers damaged to be at 60,000 units. The damaged wafers could account for as much as 11% of Samsung’s monthly NAND output, and 3.5% of the world’s NAND wafer production.
NAND wafers are vital components in the creation of NAND memory controllers, which in turn are used in the creation of solid-state drives (SSDs). Just to be clear; these memory controllers aren’t the same as the memory chips that are currently in short supply. But, considering what just happened, it won’t be surprising if Samsung will be increasing the price of NAND controller in the short-term.
In relation to that, Samsung has also been putting its NAND production into overdrive, which means that the Korean giant is undoubtedly going to be addressing the situation within the coming months.
(Source: OC3D)
