Fire at Hynix kills drops world RAM production.

Hasn't Hynix already come out and said their production capacity was completely unaffected?

 

You are correct.
Hynix says fire did not cripple China chip-making plant

 

A more calm analysis.

Basically if you want ram buy now or wait a couple months, the price increase is not going to last long.
Don't be scared into buying ram now unless you need it.

 

It's good that Hynix isn't be set back too much by this. They've been doing really well lately, if I remember correctly.

 

So basically OCUK needs to change suppliers because their current ones are just a bunch of opportunist scumbags
"We've heard there's problems at hynix, lets bump up the price by 20%, because we can get away with doing so"

 

Basically this, many people looking to exploit the uncertainty of the situation to charge you extra.

 

How long did it take for mechanical hard drive prices to drop back to somewhat normal levels?

 

It was around 1 year when they hit tolerable levels, but it was over 1.5 years to hit the same price levels as before the big flood on the larger 2TB models.

 

This situation is much, much less damaging.
We should have a more complete analysis of the situation within the next week.

 

And Samsung have largely enough production facility to counter it by expand his own production.. ( sad thing to say, but samsung is surely happy ).

Knowning Samsung, they could even rent some lines to Hinyx, the same way they have do it by open their facility to Japanese panel production after Fukushima.

 

The fire was in the air purification unit which is essential to the working of the clean rooms. That also means there's a good chance that the air ducts and clean rooms suffered from smoke damage to one degree or another. Something that has to be cleaned up before clean room operation can begin. While that doesn't represent "material damage" to the clean rooms, it is still something that will take some time to get sorted.

If they are quick and can get the air purification unit repaired or replaced quickly then this could only mean the affected clean rooms are only out of operation for maybe 2-3 weeks (a short time).

This will affect spot market prices but is unlikely to affect contracted prices. Of course that means if a contract partner ends up needing more memory chips than contracted for, it could affect them as they'd have to hit the spot market. This of course, also depends on what pricing structure is built into the long term contracts.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm not versed in the physical plant setup of a fab, but wouldn't it be possible to automatically monitor the output of the air purification plant and shut things down before it filled the clean rooms with smoke?

I'm curious if an explosion that close to the fab equipment could trip vibration sensors and force them off automatically as well. The smoke or shock of the explosion could have ruined some of the wafers that were actively being processed at that point in time, though that's probably not what Hynix would consider a material impact.

 

Hmmm, that's true, depending on what safeguards they had, it might be possible.

I may or may not be looking too closely at their wording, the bolded part.

It would have been easy enough to just say that the clean room wasn't materially damaged, but they only stated that the fabrication equipment wasn't materially damaged. IMO, allaying fears that the machinery had been damaged by the fire. But not saying much about the condition of the clean room itself.

When looking at PR damage control, what they don't say is often as important as what they do say.

Regards,
SB

 

Seriously, without having a complete reports in hand, this will be impossible to tell, this or this could or could have not happend..

 

Generally, aircon is above clean room space or off to the side. Give the dynamics of fire born smoke, if it was in the aircon system, it is likely that the system rapidly shut down putting minimal amount of particulates into the clean room. Once they get the aircon back up and running, they will likely just be running the aircon/filtration system for a while which will clean out any particulates in the clean rooms since that's their normal job anyways.

The most likely effect is increased fault rate for a bit once the fab gets back up and running. Now if foam or water got into the clean rooms via the air vents, it will obviously take longer.