[단독] NXP’Semiconductor Cleanroom’ Damages in Texas Cold Wave

While it has not yet been disclosed whether the semiconductor plant of Samsung Electronics in Texas, USA, which has recently resumed factory restoration and operation, has not been disclosed, it has been confirmed that the core process was damaged due to an abnormal cold wave at a nearby NXP semiconductor plant. NXP, a Dutch semiconductor company, was shut down the same day as Samsung Electronics in February due to a strange wave and power shortage in Texas.

As a result of checking the official website of Maeil Economic Daily on the 6th, NXP Senior Vice President Steve Presence published an article in the nature of a major shareholder report detailing the recent recovery process and the degree of process damage at the Austin semiconductor plant.

In the case of this incident, which is of great interest from shareholders and local communities, it has revealed the extent of the damage and that it did not pose a safety risk to the local community during the recovery process.

Senior Vice President Presence said, “I worked in the semiconductor field for the past 30 years, but the past few months after Texas shut down the company and semiconductor factories such as Samsung Electronics. “It was a situation that I had never experienced before,” he said.

In addition, it was revealed that the’clean room’ facility, the heart of the semiconductor factory, was damaged beyond expectations, even though the state of Texas informed of the shutdown in advance and there were two days of preparation for the final shutdown.

Clean room refers to a facility in which temperature, humidity, and air pressure, as well as impurities present in the air, are strictly controlled. As it has to deal with an ultra-fine process equivalent to a thousandth of a hair, a tiny dust can affect the quality of a product, so the cleanroom level of semiconductor manufacturers is directly linked to a stable quality problem.

Vice President Presence said in detail, “Due to an abnormal cold wave, the backflow prevention pipeline made of iron lumps was cracked and the copper coils became unusable, so we discarded them. I had to pay it out and replace it with a new one.”

“NXP’s clean room is where you have to check the process system down to the level of one-thousandths of your hair,” he said. “I’ve learned more in the past few months than the semiconductor knowledge and experience I’ve learned over the past 30 years.”

In addition, he stressed that “there is no shortcut to safety,” he said, saying that the most worrisome problem in the initial recovery process was to keep a large amount of chemicals and gases in a safe state.

In the case of Samsung Electronics’ Austin plant, which is twice the size of the NXP plant and has a higher level of fine processing, the clean room must be managed at the level of tens of thousands of hair particles.

At the same time as NXP, Samsung Electronics, which started reopening its factory at the end of last month, is paying attention to whether it will present detailed information about the damage caused to the clean room facility in the Austin factory.

Meanwhile, Vice President of Presence NXP drew attention by comparing the entire restoration process to the use of a USB storage device.

“If we forcibly remove the USB device from the computer, a warning will appear saying that it has not been safely removed, and the files may be damaged,” he said. “On a much larger scale, thousands of equipment and tens of thousands of process wafers are Imagine how difficult it would be to completely shut down the fab facility you entered and resume it a few weeks later.” .

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