Computer

The earthquake in Taiwan may affect the sale of PC and PS5

The PC hardware market was experiencing a drop in prices due to a sharp drop in demand for components. Everything seemed to be going well for the end user, until nature has given us a scare. There have been several earthquakes in taiwan up to 6.9 degrees, but, Will they affect the sale of PC and PS5?

You may not know it, you have no obligation to know it, but a large part of the chips on the market are manufactured in Taiwan. The Taiwanese foundry TSMC is the one who produces all AMD graphics and processors. In addition, it manufactures the chip for the PS5 console, which is designed by AMD.

Taiwan suffers a wave of earthquakes

According to the Taiwan Meteorological Department, between Saturday and today there have been over 20 shallow earthquakes of a magnitude of up to 6.6 degrees. A few hours ago it would have been an earthquake of up to 6.9 degrees.

The information indicates that the magnitude 6.9 earthquake has been very superficial, at a distance of only 7 kilometers. It seems that the previous seismic movements were preliminary. These seismic movements have caused the collapse of a building, the derailment of a train in a station and the collapse of several bridges. Currently, there is no concise data on the existence of fatalities.

These movements have had major impact in the plants of semiconductor manufacturing. TSMC has its facilities in this country that is off the coast of China. The positive is that the earthquake has arrived to the plant very mitigated, since it has been detected a magnitude of 4.

taiwan island earthquake

For all we know, TSMC He had to evacuate your staff, especially those located in clean rooms. These rooms are pressurized and have air filters to prevent the presence of dust particles. These rooms also have an enormous number of hazardous chemicals and gases for the people. Therefore, the evacuation of these areas has been a priority, to avoid personal injury.

Apparently there is no material and personal damage in the Taiwanese foundry. Nope It has been seen affected the supply of electricity and water, which is also positive. So currently the operations continue and everything works normally.

In principle, there are no production problems and there should be no impact on the market. But, if there are more powerful aftershocks, there is no telling what could happen.

foundry tsmc taiwan

Specially protected factories

A chip production factory contains really delicate machines that are worth a lot of money. In addition to these machines, as we have mentioned, they use gases and chemicals that are dangerous to people’s health. This makes important protections necessary before possible seismic movements.

A semiconductor factory in Taiwan is required to have protection against earthquakes greater than magnitude 7. The reason for this requirement is that we are talking about very delicate material and dangerous chemicals. For earthquakes between magnitudes 4 and 5, automatic shutdown protocols are established to avoid damage.

Logically, any possible shutdown or problem in the facilities, as well as a lack of supplies, is a major incident. When this happens, you have to remove any wafer whose production process has started. Cleaning the line and starting it up again means a huge downtime until production can start again.

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