At the evening of August 3, near midnight, the 12-inch wafer factory and operation headquarters of TSMC, the world's leading wafer foundry, was suddenly reported to have a computer invaded by a virus and its production lines were all shut down. In less than a few hours, the same news came from TSMC's Fab 15 in science park in , and the Fab 14 in Tainan Science Park, which means that TSMC's three important production bases in North, Central and South, Taiwan, were all shut down due to the virus invasion recently!
It is worth noting that the third quarter of each year is the peak season for TSMC's major customers, especially the season when Apple, a large smartphone customer, starts to pull goods. At this time, there is a problem with TSMC's production line. Whether it will affect the subsequent peak season stocking effect of customers is worthy of subsequent observation.
TSMC's 12-inch wafer factory Fab 12 is the R&D headquarters of the enterprise group, and also produces and manufactures niche products. In addition, at the Longtan factory not far away, there are some back-end packaging and testing technology CoWoS (Chip on Wafer on Substrate), etc. This is the first wafer factory area that was reported to computer poisoning yesterday. After that, the same incident occurred in Zhongke Factory and Nanke Factory.
TSMC's three major production bases in North, Central and South China have all fallen into a "virus" crisis
TSMC's Taichung Science Park (Zhongke) Fab 15 factory is currently the 28-nanometer and 7-nanometer process production bases. Among them, TSMC's 7-nanometer process technology is about to take off in the third quarter. According to internal estimates, 7-nanometer's revenue contribution to TSMC will increase to 10% in the third quarter, and further reaches 20% in the fourth quarter.
In the 7-nanometer process, TSMC currently has major customers including high-speed computing (HPC), mobile communication, GPU, etc., including Apple, , Qualcomm , HiSilicon, AMD, Nvidia, etc., as well as cryptocurrency customers such as Bitmain, Ganan Creative, and Japanese Internet giants are also GMOs that are mining chip suppliers.
In terms of 28nm, TSMC's orders and production capacity at this process node are not full. One reason is that some customers switch from 28nm to 16nm process, resulting in a decrease in the capacity utilization rate of 28nm.
is currently the main production base for the 16-nanometer process in Tainan Science Park (Nanke) Fab 14 Factory, with full orders and production capacity. In addition, TSMC has announced that the 5-nanometer and 3-nanometer process technologies developed in the future will be located in Nanke.
Yesterday, at about 10 o'clock on the evening of August 3, TSMC's Fab 12, Fab 3 and Fab5 factories in Hsinchu headquarters reported that the machine crashed due to computer viruses and the production line was shut down. Until this morning, some of the equipment that was shut down began to irrigate the soft-flushing operation.
Industry analysis has not yet been heard that the production lines have recovered at present. Even if they only have one day off, the time is not long. In the past, there have been broken production lines and temporary shutdowns due to earthquakes. TSMC can make up for it with high production efficiency in the future to minimize the losses. However, it should be noted this time that wafers produced before shutdown due to poisoning may take time to re-check them.
TSMC's "anti-hacker general" Zuo Dachuan had an accident when he retired at the beginning of the year
Another noteworthy point is that in the past, TSMC's corporate anti-hacker work was checked by Zuo Dachuan, senior vice president and information director of TSMC Information Technology, but he retired in March this year, one step ahead of TSMC's founder Zhang Zhongmou.
As soon as he retired, it was reported that TSMC's wafer fabs in the north, central and southern Taiwan were simultaneously attacked by viruses, which surprised the industry.
In the past, industry insiders analyzed that semiconductor major manufacturers are often targeted by hackers. In order to steal key technologies and secrets, they sometimes attack semiconductor manufacturers thousands of times a day through the Internet. In addition, for example, , founder of Alibaba Group , Jack Ma, also said that he has to deal with hacker attacks around the world every day.
In the past, Zuo Dachuan said about TSMC's anti-hacking work. He said that enterprises must do all kinds of prevention before and after entering the company. TSMC's anti-hacking action is to adopt multiple layers of protection (Defense in Depth). In addition to blocking malicious attack programs or phishing letters through various software, if there is a loophole in the protection and hackers enter the company, they will only be in a certain area and cannot do any action. However, some hackers may have a hidden period of up to 400 days, and TSMC develops a set of software internally. As long as these hackers take action, they will be caught quickly.
Now that Zuo Dachuan has retired less than half a year, TSMC has been attacked by a virus suspected of computer hackers, paralyzing TSMC's wafer factory production lines throughout Taiwan. Regarding this matter, TSMC said it was a virus but not an attack by computer hackers, and an emergency meeting was held internally.
The computer virus infection caused by TSMC has temporarily shut down major production lines in Taiwan. This is a major event for TSMC. It has occurred less than 24 hours ago. Many details need to be explained in detail by the company, including the impact, especially the 7-nanometer process technology that will be increased in the second half of the year, whether orders for major customers such as Apple and HiSilicon will be affected, and whether TSMC needs to suspend trading next Monday to explain the situation to the outside world are all the key points to observe next observation.
