Fundamentals of Quantitative Design and Analysis - Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - page 30

FIGURE 1.15 This 300 mm wafer contains 280 full Sandy Bridge dies, each 20.7 by 10.5
mm in a 32 nm process . (Sandy Bridge is Intel's successor to Nehalem used in the Core i7.)
At 216 mm2, the formula for dies per wafer estimates 282. (Courtesy Intel.)
Learning how to predict the number of good chips per wafer requires first learning how
many dies it on a wafer and then learning how to predict the percentage of those that will
work. From there it is simple to predict cost:
The most interesting feature of this first term of the chip cost equation is its sensitivity to die
size, shown below.
The number of dies per wafer is approximately the area of the wafer divided by the area of
the die. It can be more accurately estimated by