The Volume of Semiconductor Production Is Doubling Every Eight Years

• Worldwide shipments of semiconductors reached 300 billion this year.
  
• The total volume of worldwide semiconductor production is growing at 8.5% per year--fast enough to double every eight years.
  
• The increase in the unit volume of shipments understates the increase in total production by an order of magnitude. Today's semiconductor products are much more sophisticated than those of fifteen years ago. Back then semiconductor products had only one-thousandth as many transistors per square centimeter as today's semiconductor products.

Source: Robert Atkinson and Ranolph Court (1999), "The New Economy Index" (Washington: PPI); http://www.neweconomyindex.org/