Wafers start to blanket the planet

THE SILICON MANUFACTURERS GROUP (SEMI) said that wafer area shipments rose in the second quarter of 2007 by five per cent compared to the previous quarter.

This is good news, according to SEMI, because the quarterly total area shipments are 12 per cent greater than during the second quarter of 2006.

Growth, said Volker Braetsch, chairman of SEMI, is coming from shipments of 12-inch wafers. SEMI calls these 300 millimetre wafers but measures the area in square inches, we're not quite sure why.

Shipments, then were 2,201 million square inches.

The wafers SEMI is chatting about, however, includes polished silicon wafers, which includes test wafers, epitaxial silicon wafers, and non polished silicon wafers. µ