A foul batch of photoresist chemical compounds delivered to Nvidia and AMD semiconductor foundry, TSMC, will price the corporate $550 million in Q1. One of TSMC’s chemical suppliers has plenty of explaining to do after an “abnormally treated” part triggered TSMC to scrap hundreds of 12/16nm wafers produced at its Fab 14B facility.
The studies of TSMC’s unfortunate chemical cockup first made the rounds in January, with the pure-play fab confirming later within the month that poor high quality chemical compounds had contaminated heaps of wafers. After managing to halt manufacturing and comprise the international polymer earlier than it did any extra harm, the corporate had anticipated there to be no adversarial influence on its Q1 financials because of the incident at its Nanke Technology Park.
But that’s now not the case. Lower-than-expected yields found in direction of the top of the manufacturing course of has now led to TSMC scrapping greater numbers of wafers than first estimated, leading to a discount of Q1 income by $550 million. This is later to be made up in Q2.
It’s not all unhealthy information for the fab, nevertheless. With a little bit adroit manufacturing shifting TSMC is making up a further $230m in Q1 from elsewhere. You know, that $230m you retain within the cookie jar in case of a burst pipe or catastrophic wafer harm.
TSMC and me: These are the best graphics cards
The foundry’s steerage has been revised from $7.4bn to $7.1bn for the quarter, with gross margin additionally dropping a number of share factors because the fab makes up for misplaced floor.
That’s nonetheless a complete lot of change lining TSMC’s pockets. Aside from mammoth orders from the likes of Apple and Qualcomm, the corporate has hoovered up enterprise from a number of the most prevalent PC gaming part purchasers in recent times for his or her flagship merchandise. This consists of: Nvidia’s Turing GPUs, AMD Zen 2 7nm chiplets for EPYC and Ryzen 3000 CPUs, Radeon VII, and AMD Navi.
This newest incident now dwarfs final yr’s notorious virus drama, wherein a ‘misoperation during the installation process for a new tool’ price TSMC $85m.
To forestall one other chemical-gate (who doesn’t love a great gate), TSMC has announced it’s going to “strengthen inline wafer inspection and tighten control of incoming material to deal with the increasing complexity of leading-edge technologies.” And most likely shout at its chemical provider a little bit, too.
Source
