[cure]

From TFA:

> By 2025, she foresees demand for around 185 million square feet of advanced substrate manufacturing space against about 145 million square feet built.

It's curious that the production capacity for substrate is expressed in terms of manufacturing space. Is that an industry-specific quirk?

[heisenzombie]

I work in a somewhat related industry and have definitely heard people talk in these terms. I think it's partly because a large percentage of the cost of this sort of manufacturing is embodied in facilities costs, which scale roughly-linearly with area. Because the facilities costs are high, manufacturing is therefore packed in at the maximum possible density, which means that the production capacity ALSO scales roughly-linearly with area.

Bear in mind that actual productive output, or how much a factory cost is quite possibly not public knowledge. But area is (just look at google maps). If you're an insider with some of these ballpark area ratios in your head, you can easily come to some conclusions.

I've likewise heard people talk about building particle accelerators in terms of cost-per-meter. In particular: ballparking the cost of a synchrotron light source as a million USD per meter.

[smoldesu]

"On one occasion, as Master Foo was traveling to a conference with a few of his senior disciples, he was accosted by a hardware designer.

The hardware designer said: “It is rumored that you are a great programmer. How many lines of code do you write per year?”

Master Foo replied with a question: “How many square inches of silicon do you lay out per year?”

“Why...we hardware designers never measure our work in that way,” the man said.

“And why not?” Master Foo inquired.

“If we did so,” the hardware designer replied, “we would be tempted to design chips so large that they cannot be fabricated - and, if they were fabricated, their overwhelming complexity would make it be impossible to generate proper test vectors for them.”

Master Foo smiled, and bowed to the hardware designer.

In that moment, the hardware designer achieved enlightenment."

- Master Foo and the Hardware Designer: http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/index.html

[cartoonworld]

Seems reasonable, semi is fabbed with a lithographic process, the # of devices on the wafer isn’t necessarily tightly coupled with size, has variable resolution and defects.

The work unit is completed wafers that later get binned into different device quality levels.

Makes sense when your biz is to blast plasma over mm2 of silicon

[evancox100]

What you're saying seems to make sense if they were referring to output in terms of total area of substrates produced, but instead sounds like TFA is talking about manufacturing floor space

[cartoonworld]

You're right, I didn't pick up on that, thank you.

[CRConrad]

> sounds like TFA is talking about manufacturing floor space

Does it really? I for one certainly did a double-take at the GP's interpretation. It's a product that's usually measured in surface area, and was reported in surface area. Feels pretty obviously related to the product itself, not the factory floor.