TSMC said on Thursday that the recent power outage in Taiwan has not affected its chip production.
According to the local Central News Agency, equipment malfunction at an electrical substation in Kaohsiung City has caused electricity produced at a nearby thermal power plant to be cutoff, at around 2pm.
Taiwan’s utility rotated the outage per regions to minimize damages and to provide power to major facilities such as chip fabrication plants, the agency said.
Power supply returned to normal around 8pm, it said.
According to Taiwanese market research firm TrendForce, some fabs saw decreased voltages, but these didn’t affect production. Emergency power supply systems activated as soon as the power outage happened, the firm said.
TSMC said some of its facilities saw lowered power for a short time period but it applied emergency response measures and they were not operating normally.
In April, the Taiwanese chip giant saw one of its fab suffer from a six hour power outage that it said would cost it US$10 million to US$25 million in damages.
Another one of its fab suffered from power outage due to fire in March.
An earthquake in December caused Micron to shutdown its fab in Taiwan as well.
TrendForce said TSMC, UMC, VIS, PSMC and other Taiwanese foundries accounted for 56% of manufacturing in 12-inch wafers.
They accounted for 40% in 8-inch wafers, the research firm said. Taiwan chip makers were also responsible for around 21% of DRAM production and 1% in NAND.
In February, cold weather in Texas forced Samsung, NXP and Infineon to shutdown their chip factories there.
Renesas of Japan also saw its factory shutdown in March due to fire. It is still repairing the factory.
