Renesas found cracks and a water leak at its two Kumamoto fabs, and says the cleanrooms are still holding

The cleanroom held.

That is what Renesas Electronics said on Wednesday about both of the factories it shut after the Kumamoto earthquake, and after 24 hours in which the chip industry's Kyushu problem was described almost entirely from the outside, it is the first detailed account from inside a damaged fab.

The company suspended the Kawashiri Factory in Kumamoto city and the Nishiki Factory in Kuma District, both of which sit near the epicentre of the magnitude 7.1 quake that struck at 4:27 p.m. on Tuesday. All employees were evacuated, their safety has been fully confirmed, and the company reports no injuries.

What the inspections found

Teams went into the cleanrooms on Wednesday morning and worked while aftershocks continued.

At Nishiki, some ceiling panels have fallen and cracks have been identified in walls. At Kawashiri, there are cracks in walls and some water leakage, and the leak forced a temporary suspension of the pure water supply. Ultrapure water is not a utility in a fab so much as a raw material, used to rinse wafers between process steps, so losing it stops production on its own even when nothing else is wrong.

Against that, the company reports no problems with air conditioning or with power supply systems at either site, and says the cleanroom environment is being maintained at both. The impact on equipment and on work in process is still under investigation at Kawashiri and at Nishiki alike, and Renesas says it is continuing to assess the effect on its business and on its supply chain.

The other two accounts differ

Sony Semiconductor Solutions published its own statement on Wednesday. Operations at Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation's Kumamoto Technology Center, at Kikuyo in Kumamoto Prefecture, were halted after the quake and remain suspended, and damage to the site's building and to its manufacturing lines is being evaluated. No employees working at the company's sites at the time were hurt.

That is a materially more cautious sentence than the Renesas one, and the difference is worth holding onto rather than averaging away. Renesas has told the market its rooms are intact and is now checking the tools. Sony has not yet said whether its rooms are intact. TSMC, whose JASM plant is also in Kumamoto Prefecture, said late on Tuesday that structural inspections were complete, the structures were safe, and operations were gradually resuming.

The official count, and the two other counts

Japan's Fire and Disaster Management Agency put its sixteenth report out at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. It records 3 dead in Kumamoto Prefecture, at Kashima Town and Kosa Town, and 23 injured across four prefectures, of whom 8 are seriously hurt. Four homes are recorded as partially damaged and none as destroyed. The agency states on its face that the report is preliminary and the figures may change.

Two larger numbers are circulating at the same hour, and both are legitimate.

The same agency report carries a separate line from the Kumamoto fire departments describing many injured people whose condition and whose connection to the disaster are still being classified, and it says that group includes 8 deaths. Those 8 are not yet in the table. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, meanwhile, told reporters on Wednesday that at least 13 people had been confirmed dead, and said the government would mobilise every available resource for the rescue. The three figures are not in conflict. They are counts taken at different points in the same pipeline, and the official table is deliberately the slowest of them.

The rescue was still running as this was written. The agency lists 54 rescue cases, with a collapsed factory chimney at Yatsushiro City, the collapse of the second floor of a commercial building at Kashima Town, and two buckled houses at Hikawa Town among those still being worked. Nine fires have all been put out. Evacuation orders and emergency instructions covered 222,250 and 92,743 people respectively, and about 1,410 firefighters were committed as of 1 p.m. No damage has been reported to any facility the agency classes as critical.