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How much silicon gets you a dollar's worth of chips? |
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Nov 30, 2006 at 12:35 PM |
Several economic indicators near and dear to the semiconductor manufacturing sector have been updated in November.
Among the quarterly stats published this month were SEMI's equipment billings and its Silicon Manufacturers Group's wafer shipments by area and SIA's global chip sales numbers (all of which have been quite healthy lately). Since I love to play with and compare industry statistics in different ways, I wondered what would happen if those silicon area numbers were compared to the chip revenues.
I simply divided the dollar figure for chips sold by the amount of silicon shipped. For example, in 3Q06, SIA says there were $64.1 billion in chip revenues worldwide, while SEMI's SMG counted 2.074 billion square inches of silicon wafers sent out the door. When you do the simple math, the average amount of silicon shipped per dollar spent on chips is about 30.91 square inches. When you run the numbers for 2Q06, the silicon per chip-dollar average come out to 30.16 square inches.
Since no stat is worth its salt without a reasonable reference time-frame, I went back to 2001 and ran the numbers forward, dividing annual chip sales by the yearly amount of silicon shipped. The findings are charted here.
As you can see, that hunk of silicon has stayed in the low to mid 30s for the past six years (with 2006's average estimate based on the first three quarters). Since I'm no statistician or economist, I'm not sure what the significance of this average is---and I'm probably not the first to run these particular numbers---so if anyone has any insights or ideas, please post your comments below.
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