A contamination in Inotera, a Micron subsidiary, causes 60.000 wafers to be discarded for DRAM memory, so it is expected that the price of DDR4 RAM and SSDs could rise up to 20%

There is a lot of bad news coming from Micron Technology Taiwan and it is that apparently one of the subsidiary plants of the company named Inotera has suffered contamination. On July 1, they had to close the Fab-2 DRAM module manufacturing plant due to contamination and consequent destruction of the wafers they were producing. What does this mean? Well, if the RAM was not expensive enough, this July the price could grow by 20%, so it is time to buy RAM modules if you want to renew the equipment.

The origin of the problem is in the gaseous-based nitrogen dispersion system, causing part of the wafers that were in production to become contaminated. DRAMeXchange has explained that Inotera has accused the loss of no less than 60.000 wafers at the beginning of the month, which represents almost half of production, since the company works with about 125.000 wafers every month. This problem forces to close the factory indefinitely, since the failure must be detected and solved, a task is not easy.

According to the data we have from the company and the market in general, the problem represents a worldwide reduction of 5.5% in terms of DRAM module production. Monthly the number of wafers generated is 1 million. The impact is important, because Micron supplies manufacturers of smartphones, DDR135 RAM memory, USB memories, SSDs and NVIDIA graphics cards, in addition to other products that require these memories. Those directly affected will be Crucial, Apple, ASUS, MSI and NVIDIA, especially the latter, since the market right now is divided between mining and gaming and a reduction in stock cannot be allowed.

It is not possible to calculate the time it will take for this incident to affect the market, in DRAMeXchange they do not venture a date either, but what is clear is that this month should be noticed in the price, adding more price to products such as DDR4 RAM, which already in itself is through the clouds. We must bear in mind that Inotera will have to pay for the repair, for the breakdown, that to know how much it rises and of course, it is possible that this makes the modules more expensive, because we end up paying it together.

Source: Dramexchange