When you say the respondents represent 95% of the world's total semi market, is that measured by number of wafers, fab capacities, or dollar revenues?

The 95% is based on semiconductor annual dollar revenues.

You say 14% of the respondents are from "Other"--could you be more specific as to what countries/regions make up this grouping?

"Other" includes mostly Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, with some responses from Thailand, Australia, India, etc. Israel is actually counted under "Europe."

You say virtually every chipmaker was given a chance to respond. Were there any major chipmakers that did not respond, and who were they?

None of the major chipmakers were excluded from the survey, and they all responded, but there are some smaller chipmakers that did not respond (we don't name specific companies). A total of 365 different companies responded this year.

You say that about 1 in 16 industry employees received a survey. If I extrapolate that round number and multiply it by the 48,255 questionnaires sent out, this comes to about 772,000. Should I take this to mean you estimate there are about 772,000 people working in fabs (or for fab companies)?

We rounded to "1 in 16" in the press release, but technically based on our estimate of around 791,000 industry employees, the figure is like "1 in 16.4." This count includes fab workers, management, procurement, and service.

Do you break down the information so that you know the rankings on a regional basis? What about rankings in terms of how tool companies fared in Top 10/Top 25 chipmakers vs. second- and third-tier companies? If you do, how did those subcategory lists differ from the overall lists? Were the winners winners in every region or among different kinds of chipmakers?

We will break down the information regionally, but not at this time, since we focus on the 10 Best lists at this point. The regional lists are issued throughout the year, usually around the time of Semicon shows (like China, Taiwan, and Korea). We don’t typically issue press releases on the comparisons for ratings from larger chipmakers versus smaller chipmakers, but those data are available to our customers as a part of their subscription to the data collected from the survey. We have not released these data in the past, and probably would not do so this year---it’s something that our customers are able to benefit from as a subscriber.

Do you include all kinds of device-maker fabs, including compound semi, MEMS, TFH, and/or LED?

Yes, all device-maker fabs are included.

What were some of the biggest surprises in this year's results? For example, Carl Zeiss didn't even make the process diagnostics list last year.

Both Carl Zeiss and Nikon are first-time winners in process diagnostics. Also in process diagnostics, Vistec (formerly Leica) has returned to the list after previously ranking in 1998, and Nanometrics hasn’t been on the list since 1994! Among the large suppliers of wafer processing equipment, Lam made it back onto the list this year, after dropping of last year---that was a nice comeback for the company. Also, Nikon came back to the list after a two-year absence. Among the small suppliers, there was quite a mix of newcomers to the list: JEOL, Rite Track, centrotherm, CHA, and MRL were all first-time winners.

There are two reasons why companies debut on the list: either it is the first time they have enough responses to qualify for competition in the rankings, or their ratings have improved to the point that it ranks them on the list (whereas in past years they were not on the list due to lower ratings).

Why are the Japanese chipmakers so poorly represented? Only 8.1% of respondents from an area with 25%+ of the world's fabs/wafers out must skew the results a bit.

The survey responses are grouped by the location of the respondent (ie location of the fab), which is not necessarily the location of the company’s headquarters. So, the responses given by Japanese companies that are located in China, Europe, Korea, North America, Rest of World are counted in those regions, not in Japan. That being said, we are still trying to increase our response rates from all of the Asian countries in general. It has been traditionally more difficult to gather responses from Japan, Korea, and some of the Asian countries, so we have been working on getting over half of our survey response from those areas. This year, if you include the ROW Asian responses, we reached just about 49% from Asia, and hopefully will continue to increase that number.