Toshiba NAND Flash Memory Chip Factory.

NAND Flash Memory Chips

NAND Flash memory chips are used as solid stats memory device used on your potable deice such as Digital Camera, Music players, cellphones, smart phone, the Nand Flash memory chip will retain the data when electrical current is turned off.

Flash leaders

Today, base on the revenue of these big shot companies, Samsung ranks No. 1 with share of 39.8%, Toshiba 35.4%, Micron 14.3% and Hynix 10.5% are the World Top 4 NAND Flash Memory chip manufacturers.

Power Interruption at Toshiba Factory

Everyday and night there are numerous power cut offs in our electric grids.

To us, we do not feel anything as our home electrical applicant can tolerate these kind of power interruption.

But for a Semiconductor manufacturing factory, this may be another case.

Power Outage at Toshiba

Toshiba's troubles started early Wednesday when, according to power supplier Chubu Electric Power Co., there was a sudden drop in voltage that caused a 0.07-second power interruption at Toshiba's Yokkaichi memory-chip plant in Mie prefecture.

Toshiba said the power outage could cause a 20% drop in its shipments over the next two months.   Toshiba, which makes the chips in partnership with Silicon Valley company SanDisk Corp., represents about a third of the market as the second-largest supplier of the chips after Samsung Electronics Co.

UPS

For most of the Today’s semiconductor equipment including MOCVD, Map sorter, testers, even some of the today’s sophisticated die bonder is equipped with a UPS (un-interrupted power supply) that is to use to absorb the split second power interruption, preventing the machine to get hanged or data loss, maintain a continuous power supply to the equipment, However in Toshiba case, even 0.07 second could have triggered the equipment to get cold started and initialize once again, this would abort the manufacturing system and take long period of time to restore. Toshiba would have to review their UPS system again seriously.

After the next couple months, the outage isn't expected to have a significant impact on world-wide shipments of flash memory. Some big buyers of the chips, such as Apple, have long-term supply arrangements with multiple chip makers. We believe Toshiba will have hard time to compensate the loss of 320% memory Chips.

Samsung Picks up the Golden egg

From this memory chip tragedy, Samsung stock price shoot up abruptly as the end-user are expecting Samsung will be ramping up their capacity to cover the loss of the memory Chips.

HK Snob