Chipmaker Magnachip is planning to suspend production at its factory in Gumi, South Korea for a week starting on Saturday.
This is unprecedented for a chipmaker as fabs are usually run 24/7 for the full year.
Sources said Magnachip was doing so from its high inventory and low demand.
Power will still be on at the fab but staff will take a break from work, they said.
Magnachip specializes in display driver IC and power management IC production.
It only designs driver ICs while it manufactures its own power management IC such as power discrete at its fab in Gumi.
The fab at Gumi has a capacity of 40,000 wafers per month and uses 8-inch wafers.
It is extremely rare for fabs to stop production and most of them are caused by unintended accidents.
Two years ago, Samsung suffered a power outage at its fab in Austin. This caused production to stop for three days and it took a month for the tech giant to restart production.
Last year, Magnachip recorded US$337 million in revenue and US$5.24 million in operating loss. It turned red in turns of profit while revenue dipped by 28.8% from 2021.
Meanwhile, most chipmakers that run 8-inch foundries are seeing their operation drop due to the downturn in the chip sector.
