TSMC’s Latest Factory Plagued by Fire During Construction

A fire broke out at a new TSMC manufacturing facility on Tuesday night. Reports say that the fire was detected at 7.30pm local time, and firefighters had managed to extinguish it by 9.10pm. No people were injured. The impact upon TSMC’s manufacturing and production plans, and which customers may be impacted by this unfortunate event, isn’t clear at the time of writing.

The facility was still under construction. The source of the fire is being investigated by the county's Fire Bureau, and a safety investigation is underway. Located in Zhunan, yet part of the expansive Hsinchu Science Park, TSMC broke ground on the construction last year. So far, TSMC had completed the structure of the main building and installation of some key factory infrastructure.

Reports suggest TSMC were at the stage of building clean room facilities and piping systems at the site. Over the course of the blaze, which covered 300 sq.m (3,230 sq.ft), damage was done to some machinery that had already been installed plus the chlorinated polyvinyl chloride (CPVC) piping systems.

Miaoli Fire Department, who successfully extinguished the blaze and shared the image above, are investigating the cause of the fire. TSMC will also work with its contractors to investigate what happened on Wednesday evening, and ensure it can avoid any mistakes which may have sparked this fire.

TSMC’s plans for the Zhunan facility are that it will become an additional advanced IC packaging and testing site. This is an important business for TSMC, which would like to continue to vertically integrate, to become a one-stop-shop.

Note that this is an additional advanced packaging and testing plant, meant to join four existing facilities in Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Taichung and Tainan. A different report says that the new Zhunan facility will be TSMC’s sixth plant dedicated to advanced packaging and testing. Whatever the case, it seems that TSMC will have coverage for packaging and testing work, but the new capacity at Zhunan will just take a little longer to come online.

Earlier today we reported on TSMC’s sharing of more information about its upcoming 2nm class processes. It expects to be expanding its N2 plans, with both N2P (performance) and N2X (eXtreme performance, high voltage) nodes. You can read more in our extensive article.