Potential for contamination problems on TSMC silicon wafers, major semiconductor manufacturers, affecting NVIDIA and Huawei

It was confirmed that the production line was chemically contaminated and the defective product of silicon wafer was expected to occur in large quantity at TSMC's main plant of semiconductor chip manufacturing. GPU manufacturer NVIDIA and smartphone manufacturer Huawei may be affected.

Taiwan electronics reassembly product accident: upper margin crystal or contamination, 16/12 nm production capacity loss - super network
https://www.expreview.com/66620.html

It is Fab 14 in Nanke Technology Park in Taiwan / Tainan that the wafer pollution accident occurred. This fab is said to be one of the factories damaged by virus in 2018 . The semiconductor chip manufactured by Fab 14 is a so-called mainstream product manufactured in the process of 16 nm and 12 nm, and is the volume line which is the main source of revenue of TSMC.

Representative companies ordering 12 nm / 16 nm process products include Huawei, which owns NVIDIA and Hisilicon, and MediaTek, which manufactures chips used for inexpensive smartphones. Depending on the size of wafer contamination at TSMC, there is a possibility that these manufacturers' 2019 product supply plans may be affected.

Silicon wafer manufacturing requires a very high purity, a process requiring a wide variety of chemical substances is a very high process requirement, if the used chemical substance does not meet the requirement, the wafer will be defective, the final manufacture The product can not have the performance as expected. However, silicon wafers can not be inspected during the semiconductor manufacturing process, and contamination is confirmed after manufacturing. Therefore, at the time of writing the article, the full extent of the damage has not been revealed.