In September

> forcing the facility to shut down for at least a few hours

> As a result, the company had to scrap thousands of wafers

Anything involving wet chemistry, photoresist, furnaces, etc. is very time-constrained. You can't let wafers sit around indefinitely. Certain process steps must be followed up very quickly to avoid scrap.

This is why you dont see redundant power for manufacturing lines. A 3nm line needs hundreds of megawatts to operate. You cant clear queued lots without a fully functional line. There's not much you could save by keeping part of the line operational.

This isn’t very big news. Issues occur during bring-up often. Linde’s processes are possibly so power intensive that failing over to generator power is not possible. TSMC is right to put Linde on notice since Linde should have a PFMEA and control plan to eliminate any root causes for downtime. I suspect in the long term TSMC has plans to insource this is the issue persists. Scrap happens sometimes during manufacturing, if the writer only has journalism experience and no manufacturing experience then they may not have a concept of first pass yield. After all, the TSMC logo features failing parts!