Last week a fire has seriously damaged an IC substrate plant of Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), one of the world’s top IC packaging companies.
Small technical information: to produce a processor, one will first engrave circuit on silicium wafer. Once this is done, one will need to add connectors to the processor in order to be able to install it on its socket on a motherboard. This is called "packaging".
Among ASE's major customers, there are big names: ATI Technologies, Nvidia, Intel (almost 50% of ASE packaging capacity), Motorola, Infineon Technologies, Freescale Semiconductor (manufacturing G4 processor) and VIA Technologies. Replacement solutions do exist for those companies, but for sure this fire will impact the already tight capacity of PBGA and CSP substrate packaging. However, ASE is claiming that the damaged plant is only accounting for 10% of its overall packaging capacity.
The estimated time to repair damages is ranging between 3 and 6 months depending on the packaging activity; but it might translate into a shortage of some CPU and/or GPU for the customers.
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