By I think that upon reading this brief it’s for the first time that I understand how sensitive the high tech manufacturing process is.
Toshiba just announced that one of their plants halted production after a short power failure problem. This isn’t the sort of thing that generally amazes me but here’s something different when you go into the specifics.
The power failure at Toshiba’s flash memory manufacturing plant occurred as a result of a failure at a dedicated substation. The substation operator, Chubu Electric Power, admitted to the situation and filled us in with the details.
What’s interesting is that the power failure was so small it was nearly unnoticeable yet the Toshiba robots stopped working. The robot swarm stopped as a safety precaution.
This is because due to the extremely high precision technology used for the manufacture of flash chips if a single unit fails the entire line is compromised.
Once the Toshiba manufacturing plant stopped, starting over would lead to a serious issue and will affect future production of flash memory chips. The flash memory line affected is the one that Toshiba uses to manufacture NAND chips.
Toshiba NAND chip
According to Toshiba representatives, the failure they registered Wednesday morning has affected the company’s production plan. The plan being affected will not however affect NAND chips pricing for the next year.
Apparently, NAND flash memory is expected to drop prices next year by up to half of what it costs today.
As I said in the beginning, what astonishes me is how the production process for NAND chips stopped. The power failure of the event only lasted for 0.07 seconds.
That’s seven hundreds of a second. And an entire plant was shut down… I know Toshiba should have that place wired like you wouldn’t believe but a drop in voltage for just 0.07 seconds would be unnoticeable almost everywhere.
I’m just stunned at this. It seems that the power failure was so short that Toyota’s backup power supply didn’t even have time to act and kick in.