Western Digital says contamination impacting production at Japanese facilities

https://www.reuters.com/business/western-digital-says-contamination-impacting-production-japanese-facilities-2022-02-10/

by elorant • 4 years ago

144 73 4 years ago

reuters.com

tentacleuno2• 4 years ago

Was it a fly[0], by any chance?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rUEJwsXbnk

taneq• 4 years ago

You wouldn't think they'd ship buggy hard drives, would you?

tentacleuno2• 4 years ago

I never really think about it, although I imagine the chip shortage is putting a big dent in the production of HDD's / SSD's.

nitred• 4 years ago

Does anyone know what kind of products this kind of flash storage is used in? SSDs or NVMe SSD or something else?

3np• 4 years ago

In general Kioxia are making SSDs (NVME and otherwise) as well as USB drives and SD cards. I'm guessing this affects the whole range.

numpad0• 4 years ago

said they’re working to get the plants in Yokkaichi and Kitakami back to normal operations as quickly as possible. Kioxia said its newer and more lucrative type of 3D flash was the product line impacted, and “the company does not anticipate that shipment of its conventional 2D NAND flash memory will be affected.”

Reads like NAND chips marketed as Kioxia BiCS4.

1: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-09/western-d...

xenadu02• 4 years ago

Everything that uses NAND flash, which ranges from computers to phones to TVs. WD and Kioxia supply chips to the commodity market, not just for their own branded products.

For example 40% of "Brand X" SSD drives might have WD chips, 40% Toshiba chips, and 20% Samsung chips so the manufacturer can get a better price and/or diversify supply. If WD can only supply 25% next quarter orders to Toshiba and Samsung will increase. That will naturally push prices up to some degree.

wronglebowski• 4 years ago

What does contamination even mean in this context?

andyjohnson0• 4 years ago

Impurities in raw materials?

andi999• 4 years ago

maybe dust?

MisterTea• 4 years ago

FOD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_object_damage

Working in Communications/Medical/Aerospace manufacturing, this is a MASSIVE concern.

bredren• 4 years ago

This is worth a click just to see the “Potential foreign object debris” found in the wheel well of an F/A-18 Hornet on a US aircraft carrier.

usr11062• 4 years ago

Exactly. Pretty poor news article not addressing this. At least they could have added "The manufacturer declined to comment on how the contamination occured" if that's the case.

Poor manufacturing process? (Of course poor is relative in today's silicon) Sabotage? Earthquake? (They have them all the time) Radiation from Fukushima? (Maybe a bit late 10 years after)

bell-cot2• 4 years ago

In scientific terms - some chemical (used in the production) was supposed to be 99.999999% pure...but was not, and the offending impurity(ies) was (in terms of consequences for the uber-delicate production processes) Profoundly Unhelpful.

In poetic terms - a hundred thousand tiny demons got loose in the plant, and each and every one of them will need to be laboriously exorcised, before production can resume.

maccam912• 4 years ago

6.5 exabytes short? It sounds like a lot, but does someone more informed know if that is going to make a dent?

zinekeller2• 4 years ago

6.5 million in equivalent 1-terabyte units (note that NAND chips tend to be 64-512GB, the unit is just to illustrate approximate loss). However, I'm reading it beyond the 6.5 exabytes since that the WD press release (or any Kioxia statement) did not state that the production has been resumed, so I'm assuming it's actually a downtime and not just bad chips.

jeffbee• 4 years ago

Global flash shipments last year were estimated to be ~600EB, so that is ~1%.

usr11062• 4 years ago

So nothing dramatic. Except that there is bad component shortage already (no idea whether flash is a bottleneck in the general shartage situation)

gene-h• 4 years ago

High tech electronics can be quite sensitive to small contaminants in manufacturing equipment. A plant making HDDs accidentally lubricated some of the machinery with silicone which turned out to be very bad. This silicone got into the disks and as the head passed over the disk it got hot enough to decompose the silicone oil into silica. So effectively, the hard drive disk got covered in sand and caused the hard drives to fail much faster.

The worst part is that silicone oil will diffuse over surfaces so the whole plant got contaminated and needed to be scrapped.

I've also heard that some electronics plant had an issue where some metal tiles in the lobby of the plant were growing tiny whiskers of zinc, which got tracked in by workers and started shorting out the electronics.

blockwriter• 4 years ago

Scrapped or scraped? Did they really need to abandon the plant or the equipment, or just clean it?

totalZero• 4 years ago

Silicone oil is one of the most stubborn contaminants I have ever encountered. I use trisodium phosphate to clean it up, and even then it sometimes persists. Try pouring epoxy over wood that has been polished with Pledge, and you'll see what I mean.

I can believe "scrapped."

bell-cot2• 4 years ago

Reminds me of old stories about Intel - how, when they were taking a (chip fabrication) process which worked at plant X to (new or re-tooled) plant Y, they would duplicate EVERYTHING from X at Y. Right down to the exact brand / line / formulation of the paint on (say) the walls of the lobby, the type of toilet paper in the bathrooms, etc.

Jabbles• 4 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!

capableweb• 4 years ago

That process even has a name: "Copy Exactly!"

The Copy Exactly! methodology focuses on matching the manufacturing site to the development site. Matching occurs at all levels for physical inputs and statistically-matched responses (outputs). This process enables continuous matching over time by using coordinated changes, audits, process control systems, and joint Fab management structures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_Exactly!

khuey• 4 years ago

Docker for factories.

tyrfing• 4 years ago

That general philosophy seems to be intact. A very recent example: a large machine at their Hillsboro research facility was dismantled and sent to production in Ireland, with the same model with a very slight upgrade shipped in to replace it at the R&D location.

Ignore the red herring title: https://semianalysis.com/is-intel-shipping-tools-out-of-us-f...

agumonkey• 4 years ago

the original reproducible build in a way

droopyEyelids• 4 years ago

Siloxanes are serious contaminates in several industrial processes. Another big one is powder coating "paint". It can be bad even if only comes from a personal care product used by an employee at home.

And you called out their near-infinite ability to be spread around.

Very useful and interesting class of chemicals.

nate_meurer2• 4 years ago

What is powder coating paint? Curious so as I can avoid it :)

0_____0• 4 years ago

I was watching a video about the gold coating on the JWST primary mirror segments and noticed a conspicuously placed sign warning employees not to bring anything containing silicone into the facility.[1] I had no idea it was such a problem contaminant! I wonder if they have issues with personnel using silicone based personal products at home.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgn7bKs042Q&t=211s

emsy• 4 years ago

What, you mean it’s not spelled “silicone valley”?

rrauenza• 4 years ago

Not a clean room, but reminds me when I was working in a partner's small datacenter and found an electrician in there using a chop saw on metal conduit.

quanto• 4 years ago

Are there sources for both of your stories? I would be very curious to learn the details.

jdrc3• 4 years ago

With all this chip shortage, i was thinking that i still have the same laptop from 2014. It's not like it's slow and it's not like they make them much faster anymore. So maybe the chip shortage is not as big problem as rumored?

jeromegv• 4 years ago

It's not rumoured, it's thousands of articles that explain how this is a big deal and how many industries have had to slow down because of it. Chips are used in everything, your personal laptop is really irrelevant in the equation.

kataklasm• 4 years ago

How exactly does your old laptop have anything to do with a global shortage?

gambiting• 4 years ago

I haven't been to the hospital in years, so clearly the news about long wait times at the ER are bogus.

jdrc3• 4 years ago

Well a lot of the demand that creates this shortage is for replacement of 'old' phones or laptops which are not truly old

vultour• 4 years ago

Their point was that most people already have the technology they need, and getting the latest shiniest thing isn't as much of an issue.

speeder• 4 years ago

Someone crashed my car recently. I had to buy another one (the other was impossible to repair).

I ended buying a used base model Mitsibishi Lancer, for the same price a new Mitsibishi Lancer EVO used to cost 3 years ago. And I only bought that car specifically, because it was the cheapest sedan I could find, a Honda Civic or a Toyota Corolla was literally double the price.

The reason for that? The chip shortage. While shopping for cars I even found a guy that sold his Lancer dashboard and put in its place a crappy one. Then when checking if I should buy a new HB20, I found out they are coming with crappy dashboards and the ones from 2019 are not avaialble anymore... The reason for that, again is the chip shortage, coloured dashboards with complex functions require more chips, so in case of new cars, the manufacturers are shipping them with simpler monochromatic dashboards with less functions, and some used car owners have been literally selling their dashboards to richer people, because they now are crazy expensive.

Meanwhile the government of my country has been terrified of truckers, the truckers been giving them a hard time, specially because of the prices of trucks, both used and new, they are saying that trucking is not profitable anymore and want the government to give them money.

Know why trucking is not profitable anymore? Well... the chip shortage made trucks get crazy expensive.

The government also was going to switch the machines used for voting, to make election more secure and fair (the new machines would allow better methods of recounting not vulnerable to hacking), but this was aborted, because new machines had their price skyrocket... because of the chip shortage.

The list goes on, the chip shortage is not just causing inflation or making people not afford a new laptop, it is literally disrupting production, changing products, changing people behaviour, causing social changes, causing LEGAL changes... The chip shortage literally is affecting how the leader of 250 million people is chosen!

jdrc3• 4 years ago

And major crisis, including energy, does that.

op00to2• 4 years ago

Where do you get the idea that trucking is unprofitable? The trucking industry has recovered from pandemic downturn and is making plenty of profits.

dylan604• 4 years ago

I used to think that about my 2011 laptop as just looking at the CPU speeds were not really much faster. however, CPU is only a part of the system. GPU/RAM/SSD/etc have seen several generational leaps ahead and all add up to an improved experience. Also, even though the CPU speeds aren't much faster, the transistors in the chips are drastically changing. So some bits of code run faster because now they are on the chip.

gruturo• 4 years ago

Indeed a laptop built in 2014 is unaffected by a chip shortage in 2020-22.

Until it's accidentally dropped and you need a replacement.

Or you want to buy a webcam for it. Or a car, a TV, an oven, a dishwasher. Or you interact with any service which is itself impacted, and then you suffer longer wait times, higher prices or are denied service. Maybe your ISP can't ship you a replacement if your router just got fried by lightning.

And let's hope you don't need a hospital ER, where you would find out that semiconductors are not the only critical shortage going on.

m4x2• 4 years ago

Just as an aside, a CPU from 2022 will generally be much faster and efficient than one from 2014, even if the clock speed is similar, due to architecture improvements.

RicoElectrico• 4 years ago

What a happy coincidence. Just as prices of flash memory have stabilized.

Manufacturers of commodity parts like storage or LCD panels are infamous for price fixing and gouging. All the disasters are great excuse for unjustified price hikes.

I remember how a decade ago I was building my PC and HDD prices were painful.

oynqr• 4 years ago

That was because of floods, right?

Shadonototra2• 4 years ago

yeah, building plants in regions with high seismic activity and high flooding potential was for sure the best idea of the century

now let's build our new plants in LA, that'll help a lot in the future :D

dumb western politicians are responsible of the current situation, shame on them for sacrificingmany generations of future asian-dependent citizens

kragen• 4 years ago

https://archive.fo/MQrpR

RadixDLT• 4 years ago

is this done on purpose?

oivey• 4 years ago

Why would it be? If it drives up prices, WD is less able to capture that price increase due to production losses than its competitors.

627467• 4 years ago

Was i the only one expecting to read what was actually the contaminant?

Western Digital says contamination impacting production at Japanese facilities

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