alt Hacker NewsThis isn’t very big news. Issues occur during bring-up often. Linde’s processes are possibly so power intensive that failing over to generator power is not possible. TSMC is right to put Linde on notice since Linde should have a PFMEA and control plan to eliminate any root causes for downtime. I suspect in the long term TSMC has plans to insource this if the issue persists. Scrap happens sometimes during manufacturing, if the writer only has journalism experience and no manufacturing experience then they may not have a conceptual understanding of acceptable first pass yield. After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!
In many ways I agree with you, but the problem statement (constrained/exhausted gas supply from vendor) makes it seems like this was not just line down, but the whole factory stopped for a few hours. Line down is a miserable migrane but still managable... while a whole factory stoppage makes a lobotomy seem like a good idea. It also sounds like there was not enough forewarning to park critical customer wafers in a "safe" stage of the process.
Even so, I also would still call this another monday at a semiconductor factory. Welcome! Here we play a nearly endless game of whack-a-mole. Here's your mallet and your towel. Now whack enough of the moles hard enough until they stop coming back (at least through the same holes). Beware the alpha moles.
By any road, I am surprised to see even this high-level perspective on a quality event disclosed to the mainstream public; I thought this was not standard practice. I enjoyed the read.