How a .07-second Power Cut Killed Memory Chips

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ibemerson

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There's no way this story is true. If you unplug a blower for .07 seconds, simple inertia will keep it going. And as for everything else, every power supply in the world has capacitors that will discharge and supply voltage during such blips. If their equipment can't handle such short blips they should pack it up.

I say it's either stuxnet 2.0 or a conspiracy to fix prices.
 

digitalrazoe

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I find it kinda co-inka-dinkle that there was reports that said you will be able to pick up memory for a steal then this happens ? It may look like an accident .. but there is someone in the upstairs room cheering their a$$e$ off.
 
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As far as the air quality issue. 0.07 seconds would not do anything. The fans would keep running. sure they might lose a couple rpm, but it wouldnt matter.

As far as the wafers go tho. These are very specific processes with very tight tolerances. I can easily see a power spike fucking up a lot of steps. So im sure a lot of wafers were probably ruined. Making a wafer of chips is a many step process, and if it screwed up 20 different steps at once that are being done on a few hundred wafers each, thats a lot of lost wafers, a lot of lost chips.

Im sure not every wafer in the line was screwed, but a lot probably were.
 

micr0be

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toshiba couldnt afford to cover 0.07 sec of power outage!!?? ... really?! .... i really think ibemerson is right inertia could take over a 0.07 sec outage .... do we have an electrical or mechanical engineer in da house?!
 

chriskrum

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I think a lot of people miss the extent of this event: while the actual time that power was lost might be only .07 that was long enough to knock a number of subsystems offline or out of sync and they don't necessarily restart when the power comes back on.
 

mlcloud

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What in the world do you people mean with "inertia?" I think the term is "momentum," and even if that's the case, what momentum exists in the world of silicon fabrication? In a process that may need timings down to milliseconds (and even then, we get unusable chips and DOA sticks of RAM), a 0.07 second power outage is fatal.
 
[citation][nom]ibemerson[/nom]There's no way this story is true. If you unplug a blower for .07 seconds, simple inertia will keep it going. And as for everything else, every power supply in the world has capacitors that will discharge and supply voltage during such blips. If their equipment can't handle such short blips they should pack it up.I say it's either stuxnet 2.0 or a conspiracy to fix prices.[/citation]

There's no inertia in electron lithography. Even the slightest disruption in the power feed will mean that part of the chip does not get etched or does not get etched fully
 

razor512

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CEO walks into the factory
Heads to control panel
"oooooooo what does this button do?"
Other worker screams "noooooo!!!!!" while running to the control panel
CEO yells "How was I suppose to know the off button would do that?"
Large collective facepalm at factory ensues
 

motamedn

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[citation][nom]nforce4max[/nom]Well I wouldn't be surprised if prices begin to clime again over the next week to two weeks depending on the volume of sails this so called holiday season.[/citation]
I flagged this message for poor English. I know spell check makes people spell worse, but damn.
 
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Yes, and its called a voltage sag. Its a very short term outage that causes the machines to stall, wiresaw to break etc. that would wipe out a whole brick of wafer.
we deal with this kind of situation with dynamic voltage conditioner/automatic voltage conditioner that corrects this kind of problem. example is this one http://bit.ly/abbavc
 
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Great, next thing you know, they are going to start complaining about a storm taking out 5% of the oil production and then doubling the price of gas. Wait, they already did that scam.
 

kelemvor4

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Seriously? Why would they not have batteries for temporary power and large generators for longer outages? At my office, the whole datacenter is protected and can run off grid for 14 days before refueling is required. Some executive at Toshiba should have been walked straight out the door for screwing that one up.

Or, maybe it just really is amateur hour over at Toshiba?
 

f-14

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[citation][nom]iamtheking123[/nom]Unless the air handling systems shut themselves completely down in response to the blink, a 70 millisecond switch off shouldn't have any effect on the air quality. Remember everyone working in a cleanroom is usually wearing a full tyvek suit as well.And I think you might wanna fact check "the voltage drop was too great". The greatest voltage drop you can have is going from on to off and that's what backup systems are designed to handle. I think you mean the current draw was too great or the system wasn't able to kick in fast enough.[/citation]

umh first, fans collect dust no matter what, so do the filters. turn your a/c or furance off and on fast and see what kind of dust your ventilation system spits out. sudden air pressure drops or spikes tend to loose particle that were trapped provided the filters are toward the end of their life cycle and the air ducts and fans haven't been cleaned recently.

2nd the power drop wasn't the huge problem it wouldn't have been if their back up system was able to meet the demand. say like if your previous generation equipment only drew 10,000 and your new upgraded system draws 23,000 and your back up generator was only made for 15,000 your still short 8,000 and it's not that everything wasn't getting power, it just wasn't getting the full amount it needed aka a brown out. the demand was just too great for the old back up system to handle.

it's ok this article is a rough draft. i think the wrong one got published as there were alot of parts that didn't make sense due to translation is my guess.

i think Toms should make a contest out of these errors and that people can win ooooo i don't know say a free stick of memory, HDD, or a new heatsink or some usb thumb drives with the logos from the companies that are advertising on Toms. that'd be an excellent way for Tom's to also prove to their advertisers about their readers as well as so some shameless brand marketing instead of using the articles themselves to push a product! all for just proving did some proof reading of the article which any loyal reader deserves :D
what do you say Chris?
 
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Prices for memory, specifically SSD was supposed to plummet in 2011. Now all of the sudden this happens? Hmm, I call B.S.!
 
Yup, the whole article inclines towards a rise in the prices of an already expensive product. Sine one of the companies has been pushed back in production, it gives the others reason to hike up their prices since the OEMs have targets to achieve and thus will settle for anything that'll allow them to flood the market by their target dates.
 

nebun

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ha ha ha...it's sad but kind of funny...how does a company as big as Toshiba forget to upgrade their fail safe systems...wait, BP did the same with the oil spill...
 
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