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Going metric, again, with silicon wafer-area shipment info |
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Feb 15, 2007 at 07:21 PM |
Back in May 2006, one of my posts ranted a bit about how SEMI's Silicon Manufacturers Group's silicon wafer-area shipment metrics were not, well, metric.
The measure of how much wafer real estate has shipped per quarter is still tracked in inches, not millimeters, centimeters, or meters. I'm not holding my breath for this anachronism to change, but the least I can do is convert the latest figures (announced earlier this week) to metric.
Turns out 2006 was a boffo year for the wafer folks. Revenues jumped a whopping 27%, climbing from $7.9 billion to a record $10 billion, largely on the strength of demand from the 300-mm and leading-edge 200-mm memory fabs. Area shipments popped 20% year to year, going from 6645-million square inches to 7996-million square inches. Billions and billions of square inches. Both the revenue numbers and wafer-area figures represent a doubling of the same figures from 2001, something few would have expected to see back in those troubled burst-tech-bubble and 091101 days.
So let's get metric. Wafer area shipments grew from 4287-billion (yup, we're talkin' trillions) square mm in 2005 to 5158-billion square mm in 2006, or from 4.287-million square meters to 5.158-million square meters. Seems it's time to celebrate---the wafer-area numbers crossed the 5-million-square-meter rubicon last year!
But don't wait for me to convert the dollar amounts to Yen or Euro, 'cause those are moving targets.
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