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Posts: 640
Location: Central Coast, CA
Joined: October 19, 2004
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I have been working with Semiconductor manufacturing equipment since 1982, a lot of that time in fabs, repairing equipment, and later selling it. In all those years I have never heard of a fire as bad as what is described in the article.
Semiconductor fabs use so many dangerous chemicals and gasses and the damage from even a small fire is severe. In a cleanroom, just cleaning up the environment after a fire can take months. Getting all the equipment re-qualified, longer still.
Semiconductor equipment is extremely expensive. Just from the one picture, I would guess this was an old fab, maybe the 80's or 90's and the equipment was probably fully paid off. Given how bad the fire was, I would guess it is all destroyed so they would likely need at minimum a hundred million just to replace the facilities and production equipment and that would be for the least sophisticated equipment for a low volume fab. New state of the art fabs cost 5-10 billion.
Companies can't get loans for fabs unless they are underwritten and almost all are insured by factory Mutual who also has their own safety standards that companies must comply with in order to get insurance. I would not be surprised if they would not insure this company just because of this issue.
The most likely outcome here is that the company will get their IC's made by a foundry. There are Foundries that can make anything from the simplest to the most complex IC's so if there is a market for the product and the company isn't driven into bankruptcy by losses from the fire, they should not have any problems producing chips.
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