Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the leading semiconductor chip maker, has evacuated its employees after a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the country on Wednesday and no major damage was reported. Employees returned to work just hours after aftershocks struck the island. It’s not the corporate’s first rodeo in coping with natural disasters.
TSMC, the primary chip supplier to Apple and AI darling Nvidia, said Assets As a precautionary measure, the corporate relocated its employees from a few of its production centers and temporarily suspended operations in the course of the earthquake and its immediate aftershocks. While the corporate reported damage to a “small number” of tools and is conducting an ongoing inspection to find out total damage, it said its manufacturing facilities had restored 70% of tools inside 10 hours of the earthquake and that its ” “critical tools,” akin to his multi-million dollar extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment, remain intact.
“TSMC is deploying all available resources for a full recovery, and affected facilities are expected to resume production throughout the night,” TSMC said in a press release Assets.
As evidenced by the mitigations, the manufacturer isn’t any stranger to being flexible within the face of natural disasters. According to this, there are around 2,200 earthquakes in Taiwan yearly Central Weather Administration Seismological Center, of which over 200 might be felt. The ubiquity of those events simply forced the corporate to make needed changes in its operations.
“Seismic activity is a major challenge for companies that conduct the most precise manufacturing processes of any industry,” Mark Williams, chief Asia economist at Capital Economics, wrote in an April 3 note. “But it’s one that Taiwanese chipmakers have grown up with.”
TSMC didn’t say Assets The inspection’s conclusions or the impact of the work stoppage on business are unclear, but there’s a precedent for Wednesday’s setbacks: In 2016, a magnitude 6.6 earthquake struck TSMC’s manufacturing facilities in Tainan. After the disaster, the corporate insisted the quake wouldn’t affect first-quarter shipments by greater than 1%. In fact, wafer chip shipments saw a quarter-over-quarter decline of 1.8%, but revenue fell 8.3% within the quarter.
“Although the February 6 earthquake caused some delay in wafer shipments in the first quarter, we saw an upturn in business resulting from increasing demand in the mid- and low-end smartphone segment and the increase in customer inventories,” Lora said Ho, senior vice chairman of human resources at TSMC and then-CFO, said in its first quarter 2016 earnings report.
After the disaster, TSMC reinforced the ceilings of its facilities with braces and extra stoppers on the tower storage racks to forestall slipping.
Learn from the past
It took an enormous natural disaster for TSMC to start seriously overhauling its protocols and infrastructure. The benchmark for Wednesday’s magnitude 7.4 quake was 7.6 magnitude shock in 1999which killed 2,415 people, injured over 11,000 and caused $300 million in damages.
After the 1999 quake, TSMC improved the seismic coefficient, or loads that compensate for seismic activity – 25% greater than required by law for its recent headquarters buildings – and added additional anchors to its equipment. It made extra incremental changes on its infrastructure, including dampers that dissipate the kinetic energy attributable to earthquakes, reducing the seismic activity of buildings by 15-20%. In 2015, TSMC installed an earthquake early warning system. The company didn’t respond AssetsPlease comment on the planned changes following Wednesday’s natural disaster.
TSMC’s earthquake preparedness is a cross-section of the changes Taiwan has made to its infrastructure to scale back earthquake-related damage and lack of life. While over 300,000 households lost power following Wednesday’s earthquake, 70% of them had electricity restored at 9:30 a.m
Wu Yih-min, professor of geosciences at National Taiwan University and team leader on the National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction, said Bloomberg that Taiwan has built a disaster response team to cope with disasters prior to now three to 5 years. The team can scan information online to learn where to send help, and might detect mobile phone signals and look at screenshots of surveillance footage to evaluate damage and pedestrian traffic patterns.
“Taiwan continues to develop these technologies and we have advantages,” Wu said.
