Samsung Austin Fab Power Outage Impacted CIS Production, More Production News

IFNews, TrendForce: The Line S2 fab of Samsung in Austin, Texas sustained a power interruption, which has forced it to suspend operation since mid-February, under the impact from the winter storm. TrendForce’s latest investigations indicate that the capacity utilization rate for the entire fab is not expected to climb back to over 90% until the end of March.

According to TrendForce’s investigations, Samsung was able to prepare for the power interruption ahead of time as the company had been forewarned by the local utility. Hence, the loss of WIP (work in progress) wafers caused by the incident was minimal. However, the delay in the resumption of full operation at the plant is expected to last more than two weeks, during which the fab will suspend its wafer input.

CIS logic chips and OLED display drivers are a bulk of 28nm production at the Austin fab, according to Omdia:

According to Omdia, GalaxyCore, OminiVision, and SK Hynix increase prices of their 2MP, 5MP, 8MP and 12MP sensors by 15-20% in 2Q21 due an ongoing shortage of the 8-inch fab capacity: