Key Takeaways
- TSMC goes above and beyond legal requirements for earthquake-proof buildings.
- Rapid recovery after recent earthquake shows advanced seismic protection measures.
- Global chip production safe for now, but any delay could have major impacts on supply chain.
Taiwan is home to a number of semiconductor production facilities, producing nearly all of the world’s major semiconductors. However, Taiwan is also earthquake-prone, being located on a fault line between the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. As a result, the highly sensitive job of producing semiconductors requires a number of earthquake-proof safety measures in order to continue pumping out chips as soon as possible. The most recent earthquake in Taiwan was nowhere near TSMC, taking place on the east coast when all of TSMC’s main fabs are on the west coast, but in general, it’s a place that’s prone to earthquakes, and this is how TSMC manages to protect itself from them.
How TSMC protects itself from earthquakes
Building protections are a must
Did you know that we already have earthquake-resistant buildings? If you live in a place prone to earthquakes then you probably already did, but if you didn’t, well now you know. This involves dampening the shock and redistributing the kinetic energy in the building towards the foundations as quickly as possible. These can include diaphragms and large, heavy pendulums that go against the earthquake’s movements.
That’s not all that TSMC does though, and the company claims that it goes above and beyond the legal requirements for an earthquake-resistant building. Equipment has seismic anchorage, dampers are installed throughout facilities, and floating piles are installed in all fabs in Tainan Science Park. Floating piles essentially transfer the support of the building from looser soil to more stable, deeper soil layers further beneath. This is because looser soil effectively acts as a liquid during an earthquake, and can lead to structural damage if it’s all that the building relies on for support.
The anti-seismic ability of facilities throughout TSMC’s fabrication facilities involves frequent inspections, constant seismic reinforcement verification, and the employment of 180 earthquake protection guards that have jobs dedicated to protection against earthquakes. Wen-Yee Lee on X (formerly Twitter) shared that within 10 hours after the earthquake, the recovery rate of wafer fab equipment had exceeded 70%, and the recovery rate of newly built fabs had exceeded 80%. Some equipment was damaged, but major machines like Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment were undamaged.
Global chip production is safe
For now
TSMC is lucky that Taiwan’s strongest earthquake in 25 years happened on the west coast rather than the east, as this could have been significantly more devastating for the company and, in turn, for global chip production. Companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, and even Intel with Meteor Lake are reliant on TSMC’s fabrication facilities to make their chips, and any delay in production could lead to significant impacts on the supply chain.
Because of the dominant position that TSMC finds itself in, any impact on the company’s ability to produce chips has massive ramifications for supply chains globally. Earthquake-resistant construction is a technical marvel, and it’s technology that we’ve developed over years and years that have managed to make earthquakes safer not just for our production facilities, but for homes and even skyscrapers too.
Following the most recent earthquake, TSMC announced that all personnel were safe and that it had evacuated everyone once its instruments detected early signs of an earthquake.