Renesas restarts hampered by black outs

LONDON – Renesas wafer fabs and back-end facilities affected by the devastating earthquake that hit Japan on March 11 are beginning to retart operations but progress is being hampered by rolling electricity black outs.

Renesas Electronics Corp., which had five wafer fabs and three back-end packaging facilities, closed by the earthquake, issued an update to its guidance on Friday (March 18). None of front-end wafer fabs has resumed work but two of the back-end facilities has, according to the update.

At four of five the front-end of line wafer fabs Renesas is "preparing to begin startup procedures to restart its manufacturing," The four fabs are Tsugaru, Aomori; Tsuruoka, Yamagata; Takasaki, Gunma and Kofu, Yamanashi. The fifth fab – Naka factory in Ibaraki – remains closed and Renesas is still working to restore the electricity supply and then to assess the status of the clean room after the investigations of the in-plant electrical substation systems are completed.

The back-end factory at Aomori is "preparing to begin startup procedures to restart its manufacturing." The Oume-shi, Tokyo and Yonezawa, Yamagata back-end facilities restarted on Friday and Saturday, respectively.

However, those restarts can only take place planned blackouts are not taking place and Renesas advised that the Tokyo facility would be temporarily shut on March 19 and March 20 due to black outs that were scheduled to take place twice each day. The length of these black outs is not disclosed.


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