alt Hacker News> forcing the facility to shut down for at least a few hours
> As a result, the company had to scrap thousands of wafers
Anything involving wet chemistry, photoresist, furnaces, etc. is very time-constrained. You can't let wafers sit around indefinitely. Certain process steps must be followed up very quickly to avoid scrap.
This is why you dont see redundant power for manufacturing lines. A 3nm line needs hundreds of megawatts to operate. You cant clear queued lots without a fully functional line. There's not much you could save by keeping part of the line operational.
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It didn’t happen, but the facilities team at the fab where I worked was seriously considering installing a flywheel to cover power bumps. What I don’t get about this story is how this actually happened. All our process gasses were out in a tank farm and we knew how much pressure we had. We would have stopped the line if there wasn’t enough to proceed. Were they separating air onsite or something?
Good idea for a Factorio mod?
A new failure mode resets output progress back to zero if you lose power or some other input while crafting.
You could design circuit networks to cut power to non-essential systems so the rest of the factory can keep producing.
A video showing those steps, for the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9CGRZwD-w
It's probably not 100% identical to TSMC's process.
TSMC has backup generators in their AZ fab. You actually have to have backup power or a few hundred millisecond blip could cause days or weeks of tool down time. You should see what happens when you lose the ability to keep a clean room at temp/humidity/airflow...it's weeks or months.