Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.

Situated at Samsung’s huge production complex at Suzhou Industrial Park in Jiangsu province, the new 7.5 generation fabrication line is capable of producing 100,000 glass substrates a month.

Each substrate can be divided into eight 42-inch panels, six 46-inch panels, or three 55-inch panels, which is enough to produce between 300,000 and 800,000 liquid crystal display (LCD) TV sets a month. Production at the new plant is expected to start in the first half of 2013.

Together with Samsung’s existing LCD module production plant at its Suzhou complex, the new LCD line enables Samsung to create an integrated LCD production base for China, by far the world’s largest market for LCD televisions.

Providing protection
To ensure that production at its multi-billion dollar investment is not brought to a standstill by power failures, voltage sags and other electrical disruptions, Samsung selected ABB to provide the new plant with a power protection solution.

The solution comprises eight ABB PCS100 UPS-I low voltage uninterruptable power supply (UPS) units, which have a combined protection capacity of 16.5 megavolt amperes (MVA) of electric power.

The PCS100 UPS-I is a single conversion UPS with an ultra-capacitor energy storage system coupled to a back-up inverter system to allow the downstream load to remain operational during short power outages and very deep voltage sags.

Among the many differentiating features of the PCS100 UPS-I solution for semiconductor applications are:

- Short payback time, typically less than 12 months
- Large low voltage power capacity of 16.5 MVA (most other solutions require medium voltage systems for this capacity)
- Ultra-fast transfer time of less than 2 milliseconds
- Exceptionally small footprint – 50 percent smaller than competing solutions
- Long and more economical operating life – 15 years compared to the 3-5 years of UPS batteries
- Comprehensive customer support

New Samsung mega-investment
Recently Samsung selected 22 PCS100 UPS-I units for its latest mega-investment in China – the $7 billion NAND flash plant in Xi'an. The facility will have a monthly output of 100,000 nanometer chips and is expected to become fully operational towards the end of 2013. NAND chips are used primarily in memory cards, USB flash drives, solid-state drives, and similar products for data storage and transfer.

To date, ABB has supplied more than 680 megawatts of PCS100 power protection solutions to high-tech semiconductor and flat panel LCD manufacturing facilities worldwide.