The earthquake that hit Taiwan early in the morning on Thursday did not harm the islands’ semiconductor manufacturers substantially. Inotera, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and United Microelectronics Corp. said that the quake did not impact their production or manufacturing capacities substantially.

“TSMC today announced that the earthquake registered on instruments at TSMC's Tainan site at magnitude 5, and was measured at TSMC’s Hsinchu site at magnitude 2. Current assessments reports show that the earthquake had minimal impact on Hsinchu fabs. While Tainan fabs suffered greater impact, they have gradually begun to resume production. Our initial estimate is that the earthquake caused the equivalent of 1.5 days loss of wafer movement for the company in total,” said the world’s largest contract maker of semiconductor.

It is noteworthy that UMC – the arch-rival of TSMC – also lost just about 1.5 days of production due to halt of manufacturing process.

“The earthquake recorded on March 4th, 2010 did not impact the company’s Hsinchu fabs and office areas. Buildings, facilities and equipment in Fab12A in Southern Taiwan Science Park were also unaffected, although some production lines in Fab12A were halted due to the shutdown of certain equipment. UMC conducted maintenance and examination immediately following the incident. The estimated production days affected on the company in total will be approximately 1~1.5 days. The company will adjust manufacturing upward at Fab12i in Singapore and close any production gap once Fab12A resumes full production in order to minimize the approximately 1~1.5 days accumulated production impact,” said United Microelectronics Corp.

“Earthquake has no significant impact on the Company's finance and business,” a statement by Inotera, a well-known maker of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), reads.

The earthquake of magnitude 6.4 on the Richter scale occurred in south Taiwan at 8:18AM Taiwan local time on March 4. No human casualties have been reported.

Tags: TSMC, UMC, Inotera, Semiconductor, Business