Semiconductor History | 聯電8A・8B廠, 新竹科學園區 — The Month of Work Sitting Inside the Machines

A finished wafer is not made in a day, and that single fact decides what an earthquake costs a chip industry. A logic wafer of the late 1990s passed through more than a hundred sequential operations and spent something between six weeks and two months inside the fab before it emerged. At 01:47 on 21 September 1999 every fab in 新竹科學園區 stopped with all of that inventory still in it, at every stage of the flow at once. Some of those wafers survived the night. Wafers sitting in or beside diffusion furnaces did not, and neither did much of what was part-way through a lithography sequence, where a great deal of exposure work is undone by a few centimetres of movement. Published estimates of what Taiwan's chipmakers lost in work-in-process alone cluster around US$400 million. The more revealing number came from 王弓, then director of the science park administration, who broke the total apart afterwards. Roughly a quarter of the loss was equipment and destroyed material. The remaining three quarters was time, production hours the calendar simply removed and no insurer could return. 國科會 put the IC manufacturing industry's total loss near NT$10 billion. Then the memory market moved, which is how the rest of the world found out. Spot prices for 64-megabit DRAM modules passed US$21 in Korea by the middle of the following week, and PC100 modules reached US$21.25 on the North American spot market, several times what the same parts had fetched earlier that year. Analysts writing at the end of September expected the real shortfall to arrive in November, because the wafers destroyed on the 21st were the ones that would have shipped in the weeks after it. That lag is the mechanism worth carrying away from 921. The fabs lost little to shaking and a great deal to stopping, and the bill reached consumers a month and a half later, at the till, in the price of memory. The photograph shows the entrance to 聯電's 8A and 8B fabs on the park's eastern side, with the wafer disc set into the glass above the door. They were among the plants standing full of half-finished silicon that night, and the pin sits on the photographer's position outside them. Photo: ABOVE THE SKY, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.