IC firms in Wuhan facing unstable equipment engineering, materials support
Staff reporter, Taipei; Willis Ke, DIGITIMES
Wednesday 12 February 2020
Semiconductor plants in Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, are facing increasing variables that may seriously affect their operations, particularly insufficient technical support from equipment suppliers and unstable shipments of raw materials and components associated with major traffic controls, according to industry sources.
The sources said foreign equipment suppliers have evacuated their technical engineers stationed at Chinese foundry and memory plants back to their home countries, and US enterprises have stopped sending staff to China on errands, all significantly hindering normal operations of the plants.
Yangtze Memory Technologies, for instance, is at the final testing stage for mass producing its 64-layer and 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory chips, and lack of sufficient equipment engineering support will undoubtedly drag down its volume production and R&D progresses, the sources continued.
Wuhan Hongxin Semiconductor Manufacturing (HSMC) is proceeding with plant construction and will face limited impact from the outbreak as it does not have to worry about revenues, orders or capacity utilization. But its equipment move-in and installation, originally slated to start in March through the second quarter, may be affected if the epidemic fails to be contained in the short term.
On another front, semiconductor firms in Wuhan will see logistics operations for raw materials, components and finished products continue to be restricted due to strict traffic controls on major roads, further prolonging their unstable production and shipments, the sources said.
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