Tsmc temporarily closes its factory fab 14, could affect nvidia

TSMC's Fab 14 factory has reportedly experienced a production shutdown after some 'low-quality' chemicals used in the manufacturing process ruined tens of thousands of wafers.

TSMC is forced to cease work on Fab 14 due to manufacturing defects

TSMC is one of the world's largest chip manufacturers, and is chosen by NVIDIA for the development of graphics processors, so the green company could be one of the most affected by this cease in production.

Sources say that defects in silicon wafers cannot be detected until after production. Among the affected companies are the most important in the sector, such as NVIDIA, MediaTek, Huawei Hisilicon and some ARM server processors. Currently, the 16 / 12nm process is one of TSMC's main sources of revenue. TSMC does not know the financial impact of the loss at this time, but it is expected to be extremely high due to the advanced technology these chips use, such as NVIDIA GPUs. Recall that the GeForce RTX series is manufactured with a 12nm node.

Fab 14 had already had problems with a computer virus last year

More detailed information said the wafer contamination incident occurred at the Fab 14 factory in Nanke Tehcnology Park. This factory was also one of the factories affected by last year's virus incident. Wafer making is a very demanding process that requires the use of a wide variety of chemical materials and requires high purity of those materials. This accident is due to the fact that the chemical materials that were used at a certain time did not meet the purity requirements, leading to defects in the wafers produced.

The consequences of this will surely cause a delay in the manufacture of chips for several very important technology brands, although we do not know the extent of their severity at this time.

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