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Power Outage May Cause Flash Memory Shortage

Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 12:15 PM - by

Samsung Electronics unexpectedly lost power at six of its production plants on Friday, shutting down production of memory and logic chips. The plant in the company's Giheung complex outside Seoul went down after a power transformer failed, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Five of the plants produced DRAM and flash memory for computers and handheld devices like cell phones, digital cameras, and digital media players including Apple's iPod products and the iPhone. What impact this may have on Apple is still unclear, but the temporary shortage caused by the outage is expected to affect electronic device manufacturers, especially since many of the chips on the production line are likely unusable.

The power outage could leave Samsung unable to restart its production lines for several days should workers need to clean equipment covered with chemicals used in the manufacturing process. The chemicals must be maintained at a specific temperature, and "can stick to equipment if the temperature isn't maintained," according to Lehman Brothers semiconductor analyst, C.W. Chung.

The downtime is expected to cause about US$55 million in economic damage.

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Bosco said:

member since 03 Jun 2002 with 1002 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Sat Aug 04, 2007 1:49 am

Yeah right. They're just taking a cue from the oil companies and having the DRAM equivalent of a "mysterious refinery fire" to jack up prices. Well, we're smarter than that. I say we boycott the DRAM companies by not buying DRAM on Fridays. That will show them!

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