The main factory of Renesas Electronics (Renesas Electronics), a major global manufacturer of automotive chips, stopped production last month because of a fire, adding to the global chip shortage problem. According to Japanese media reported on Friday (April 9), Renesa electronics disaster chip manufacturing plant will restart production by April 19.
However, it will take another two months for Renesas to return chip production to pre-fire levels until the end of June, the report said.
A fire broke out at the Nake factory in Ibaraki Prefecture in eastern Japan in the early hours of March 19, starting in the "clean room" of the factory's core facility. After the fire, the 12-inch (300mm) wafer production line of the Nake factory was forced to stop production. The company initially estimated that 11 chip production facilities were damaged, but later found 17, exacerbating the global chip supply crisis.
The company has previously said it would take at least a month to restore the 300mm wafer production line at the fire-stricken plant, but it could take months to replace the damaged machines, meaning it could take longer to fully resume production.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Renesa Electronics had decided to use the Xitiao plant for alternative production operations in order to solve the shortage of semiconductors. Renesas also plans to use other Japanese factories and entrust overseas manufacturers to expand the scale of alternative production. However, including the preparation of the production line, chip production takes a long time, so the shipment of alternative products is estimated to take about 90 days.
"Chip shortage" aggravates
Renesas production disruptions have exacerbated the global "chip shortage", a problem that has plagued global car and electronics makers since the end of last year.
Renesas has a 30 per cent market share in microprocessors, an important semiconductor that controls car driving, while the fire-hit Nake factory supplies 2/3 of its chip output to the car industry.
Japanese media reported that according to private estimates, the fire in the Ruisanake factory may reduce the production of Japanese car factories by up to 2.4 million units, so the speed of resuming production has become the focus of market attention.
Supply shortages began to appear in the global semiconductor market at the end of last year. Since the beginning of this year, a series of natural disasters such as Earthquake in Japan and blizzard in the United States have made the "chip shortage" more and more serious. Volkswagen, Ford, General Motors, Honda, Toyota and other car companies have fallen into a storm of production cuts because of chip shortages.
At present, the shortage of chips is still getting worse. General Motors of the United States, Ford and Nissan of Japan all said on Thursday that they would further cut car production because of a shortage of semiconductor chips.
