Hynix Semiconductor on April 21 saw a power glitch at a main DRAM fab in Korea, but the company maintained that no losses resulted from the incident, according to reports.
Hynix said voltage dropped suddenly at fab M10, but only lasted 0.1 second, the reports said, adding the plant's uninterruptible power supply system prevented losses from occurring.
But industry sources in Taiwan claimed that power was cut off for two hours between 1-3 p.m. Wednesday, and whether the outage would affect overall supply of DRAM chips remains to be seen.
Hynix's 12-inch M10 fab has a capacity of 120,000-130,000 wafers a month.
In May 2008, Hynix suffered a four-hour blackout at its Wuxi, China fab. The company estimated losses from the incident at US$16-18 million.
In other news, contract prices for 1Gb DDR2 chips have gone up by 2-3% to average US$2.50 for the latter half of April, pushing the price of 2GB DDR2 modules to US$43, according to DRAMeXchange. Prices for DDR3 parts have remained unchanged at US$2.69 on average.