WSPM stands for W afer Starts P er M onth , which is a measure widely used in the semiconductor manufacturing industry to detail the number of wafers leaving the plant each month. With this, the manufacturing capabilities of a fab or foundry can be determined.
Surely on more than one occasion you have come across these figures in some news or analysis of the semiconductor industry and you have not known what it is. Well , your doubts will be dispelled here .
Index of contents
- More about WSPM
- How many wafers are made?
- How many chips does a wafer hold?
More about WSPM
Every year millions of wafers of different types of chips are produced around the world, counting the manufacturing capacities of the different foundries that exist today. Larger factories, like the TSMC factories, can have very large WSPM rates, more than many might think.
In addition, these fabs are usually focused on the production of wafers of a certain size and at a certain node. For example, the fabs of the most advanced processes, such as 7nm, 5nm, 3nm, etc., usually use 12″ wafers, that is, 300mm diameter wafers where hundreds of chips can be manufactured. While other fabs are dedicated to 200mm wafers and lower fabrication processes 20nm, 65nm, etc., which are still being used for a multitude of less complex chips.
How many wafers are made?
To give you an idea, TSMC has doubled its production capacity of 5nm wafers reaching around 55,000 or 60,000 WSPM to finish at around 120,000 WSPM. It is also planning to build a factory in the United States, in Arizona. A plant intended for 5N nodes and could have a capacity of 100,000 WSPM.
On the other hand, also using TSMC as an example, saying that the production of 4nm and 5nm chips should rise to 150,000 WSPM in Q3 of this year .
As you can imagine, the capacity of TSMC is enormous , that is why it is the largest foundry in the world, manufacturing the vast majority of the complex chips that are needed today. To all these plants we must add those of other plants that exist in other parts of the world, such as the one in Japan, which is a fab with 300mm wafers using a variety of nodes and with a capacity of about 8000 WSPM.
How many chips does a wafer hold?
With this you can get an idea of the number of chips that are manufactured, since each wafer could hold between 100 and 300 chips , depending on the size. And that is many millions of chips in this plant alone, to which should be added those of many other foundries such as GlobalFoundries, Infineon, X-Fab, Bosch, UMC, SMIC, Micron, Tower Semiconductor, Intel, Microchip, Renesas, Samsung , SK Hynix, LG, NXP, STMicroelectronics, ON Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, and many more.
We recommend reading our guide on the best processors on the market .
