When Samsung announced that it would close its production facility in Austin during last month’s winter storm, the company expected to have the plant up and running in a few weeks. Last week, we reported that the restart was taking longer than expected. Now, there are reports that the facility may not be online again until April. This means that we probably will not ship hardware until May.
Samsung’s S2 line is responsible for manufacturing about 75 percent of its SSD controllers. If the company resumes manufacturing in early April, it may have controllers ready for shipment in May. This assumes that the DigiTimes report (via THG) is accurate, but we will find out soon if it is. A 75 percent reduction in available SSD controllers is a material risk to Samsung’s storage business in the short term.
We don’t know how many SSD controllers Samsung had on hand when the shutdown happened, but 75 percent is a large number and it looks like the factory will be offline for at least another three weeks. Samsung’s S2 line produces about 5% of semiconductor silicon per month. The initial projected impact of 1 to 2 percent of shutdown looks more like 5 to 10 percent, depending on exactly when Samsung can get the factory up and running.
Samsung image
The problem, again, is that semiconductor manufacturing is slow, at all stages. It takes years to build a factory and 6 to 12 months to put it into full production. It takes 6 to 12 months to transport a chip project from one smelter to another. After finishing the project, it is time to tackle the actual manufacturing process. Spoiler alert: it’s not fast.
Wafers are usually processed in batches known as wafer batches. It takes many weeks of wafer to go through the entire manufacturing process. According to this 2017 article, it typically takes between 0.8 and 1.5 days to process each mask layer for a device. 28 nm devices typically have between 40-50 layers of mask, while 14/10 nm chips have about 60. We don’t know exactly how many layers Samsung uses for its SSD controllers, but if you assume 0.8 days per layer of mask and 55 masks, this will come to a processing time of 44 days. SSD controllers are not as complex as a CPU, so it makes sense that they take a little less time to build. DigiTimes’ references to a one-month delay between restart and shipments of new hardware have not been confirmed, but are plausible.
Samsung accounts for about 28% of the NAND market. A 75 percent drop in controller output may well lead to price increases on Samsung’s SSDs, likely prompting customers to look for alternatives. This, in turn, is likely to increase the price of other units. If you are planning to purchase an SSD at any time in the near future, you may want to do so sooner or later. Historically, price increases caused by scarcity in the storage market have taken several years to disappear.
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