LOS GATOS, CA -- Last weekend's series of strong earthquakes which hit Japan’s southern island of Kyushu brought local semiconductor production to a temporary halt but did not cause severe damage to the factories.

The first, on April 15, measuring 6.2 on the Richter Scale, struck at 9:26 p.m., killing nine people. This was followed by a 6.0 magnitude quake just after midnight Saturday morning. Finally, a 7.0 jolt struck at 1:25 a.m. All were within 12km of Kumamoto, and were relatively shallow, ranging from 6 to 10km below the surface. In comparison, the devastating Fukishima earthquake of April 2011 measured 9.0 on this scale, which is logarithmic – this means that the Kumamoto earthquake was 1/100th the energy of the Fukishima event.

Semiconductor companies in the area tell us that there are continuing aftershocks since this series of earthquakes. The local government’s disaster management office reports 32 deaths from these events, and believes that 23 more are buried in the rubble of collapsed buildings.

Impact on Chip Manufacture

Kyushu hosts a number of semiconductor plants which are documented in the database maintained by the Industry Research & Statistics Group at SEMI (which helped Objective Analysis to create this assessment). The largest number of fabs on the island belong to Sony, which operates all six of the island’s 300mm facilities. The company has been reserved with its information, only releasing today a brief comment that the company’s Kumamoto Technology Center were halted after the earthquake on April 14, and the timeframe for resuming operations has yet to be determined. This plant primarily manufactures image sensors for digital cameras and security cameras and micro-display devices.

Both Sony’s Nagasaki Technology Center and its Oita Technology Center were temporarily halted, but the impacted equipment was restarted on Sunday, April 17, and production has resumed. The Nagasaki Technology Center is Sony’s main facility for smartphone image sensor production. The Oita Technology Center was recently sold to Sony by Toshiba and had just begun operations for Sony on April 1.

Sony’s Kagoshima Technology Center continued its production operations after the earthquakes, with no major impact on operations. Sony has confirmed the safety of all of its and its group companies' employees in the region affected by the earthquakes.

Mitsubishi established a companywide disaster management office at its Tokyo headquarters immediately following the first earthquake, and has since been confirming the situation on the ground, implementing necessary measures. Production was halted at the company’s Kumamoto Power Device Works, although no buildings have collapsed. Damage to structures and production lines is currently being assessed, and as soon as operational safety has been confirmed Mitsubishi will consider when to resume operations.

Renesas reports that its Kawashiri facility, the only Renesas facility on the island, halted operations immediately after the earthquake and is currently assessing its status. The company will provide details as soon as they become available. All employees evacuated safely with no casualties.

Toshiba, with only three local wafer fabs (compared to Sony’s 13), gave the greatest detail on its status, including an update on the company’s key suppliers, one of which is a Sony facility. Of its plants, the only one that needed to be shut down was its Oita Japan Semiconductor Corp. (JSC) plant, which was to be restarted on April 18. Sony Semiconductor’s Oita Technology Center also suspended operations and is to restart production soon.

Jim Handy is a semiconductor analyst at Objective Analysis. 

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