One of the more telling semiconductor manufacturing metrics, the quarterly silicon wafer area shipment numbers, came out earlier this week.
The strong growth trend continues, with a 3% uptick seen in Q106 vs. Q405 and a whopping 29% jump seen in Q106 vs. Q105. SEMI silicon manufacturers group (SMG) chairman Tatsuhiko Shigematsu also notes ominously that the polycrystalline silicon shortage---caused in no small part by the boom in photovoltaic solar-cell production---"may become a major constraint in meeting the future wafer demands."
My beef is not with the analysis itself or the stats analyzers themselves, but that they continue to use the English system of measurement for what is a global industry standard. I asked SEMI's Dan Tracy awhile back about why they hadn't switched to metric, and he told me that conversion had been discussed but nothing had come of it yet. (Dan or other SMG members, correct me if I'm not up to speed on any ongoing initiatives in this regard.)
Wafer diameters have been referred to using millimeters for quite some time, especially with the advent of 200-mm and then 300-mm wafer sizes. Sure, some folks still say "8-inch" and "12-inch" out of force of habit (although it sounds a bit strange to hear someone say "inches" with a German or Chinese accent, don't you think?), but have you heard anyone talk about 18-inch wafers? When and if the next wafer size comes to the fore, it will be referred to as 450 mm, period.
So here's my proposal: start converting the wafer area shipments into millimeters or even meters, but continue to cite the statistics in inches for a year or two. Also, slowly convert the archival records to metric as well. As an example, I went to www.onlineconversion.com (my favorite Web shortcut to measurement conversion and enlightenment) and ran the latest wafer numbers. The Q405 total shipment number was 1,826 million square inches, which converts to 1,178,062,160,000 square millimeters, or with some rounding 1,178 trillion. If you want to dispense with all the extra digits, why not just convert to meters? In that case, the number is 1,178,062 square meters. For the Q106 wafer shipments, the inch count was 1,884 million, which is 1,215,481,440,000 square millimeters (1,215 trillion) or 1,215,481 square meters.
So maybe the millimeter number starts to become a little unwieldy (you should see the square micrometer and square nanometer numbers!), but it is also much more precise and, well, logical. And see how easy it is to convert to plain ol' meters? Also note the major milestone, when measured this way: the industry surpassed the 1 million square-meter quarterly-shipment mark quite recently!
And that, gentle readers, is a whole lotta silicon.
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