Semiconductor History | 台積電二、五廠, 新竹科學園區 — Headlights on the Ring Road at Two in the Morning

The shaking reached 新竹 at 01:47 on 21 September 1999 as a long roll rather than a jolt, and the alarm systems in the park's twenty-six wafer fabs tripped within seconds.

Night-shift operators walked out of cleanrooms that had been running continuously for years.

遠見雜誌's reporting that October describes what happened next on the roads outside, and it is the detail worth keeping.

By roughly two in the morning the park's perimeter roads were filling with cars, and because the streetlights were dead the only light on them was headlights.

Managers and engineers from 台積電, 聯電, 華邦電子 and 旺宏電子 were driving in without having been called, having worked out what a fab with no power meant before anyone thought to tell them.

Standby generators carried twenty to thirty per cent of normal load, which is nowhere near enough to run production.

Every company spent that capacity the same way, on the cleanrooms.

A cleanroom that loses temperature and humidity control for long enough stops being a cleanroom, and certain lithography optics do not simply resume when the air is restored.

The specific casualty was 石英爐管, the quartz tubes at the core of diffusion furnaces, which are hard, brittle, and unforgiving when a building moves around them.

崇越科技's chairman 潘重良 has described his company's quartz plant working three shifts to get replacement tubes to 台積電, with the government opening a dedicated line so the plant could restart at all.

Power returned to the park in about six days.

Output did not, because a fab restarts in the order its process permits rather than the order its managers would prefer.

遠見 reported 台積電 back at one hundred per cent of output on 9 October, eighteen days after the quake, a figure that rests on that single contemporaneous account rather than on company filings.

The buildings in the photograph are 台積電's Fab 2 and Fab 5 on the park's western side, among the plants that were running that night.

They are working fabs behind a fence, and the view here is the one from the public road, which is the only view of them there is.

Photo: Peellden, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.