By Kim Yoo-chul
Staff Reporter
Samsung Electronics said Thursday it experienced a brief power problem at its chip lines in the company’s Giheung complex, but suffered no damage.
``There was no damage from a 36-second sudden voltage drop,’’ a spokesman from the world’s No.1 memory chipmaker told The Korea Times.
``The incident occurred around 5:40 p.m. local time at the K2 production zone in the Giheung plant,’’ the spokesman added.
He said an automatic system had immediately switched on right after the problem and all lines were operating normally.
The K2 zone is the same place where an extensive outage in August brought its chip production lines to a halt, causing the company to suffer some 40 billion won in lost production.
Production was normalized a day after the blackout, however, the halt led to a more than 10 percent fall in output of NAND flash memory chips. Samsung’s semiconductor plant produces over 40 percent of the world’s NAND flash memory, which are widely used in MP3 players and digital cameras.
For that reason, speculation has risen the line has some power supply problems, but Samsung denied the speculation, adding that such incidents sometimes happens.
``It’s just a minor technical problem. The K2 line doesn’t have any problem in producing chips,’’ the spokesman said.
Market analysts say the incident will not have a big impact on the industry as it was brief and wafer losses during the power problem would have been marginal.
``As the production lines didn’t stop, we don’t have to take the incident seriously,’’ Kim Young-joon, an analyst from Goodmorning Shinhan Securities said.