In recent years, SEMI has been increasing its attention to sustainability within the global semiconductor industry. With the formation of the Semiconductor Climate Consortium (SCC) within the SEMI Sustainability Initiative, member companies have joined hands to collaborate and collectively tackle the challenge of meeting the industry’s ambitious sustainability goals.The SEMI Smart Manufacturing Initiative is a global effort focused on the future of manufacturing in electronics that helps microelectronics manufacturers enable business value by facilitating awareness and problem-solving to reduce barriers and realize timely ROI for critical Industry 4.0/5.0 technology deployment.Addressing the Industry’s Sustainability Inflection Point The Initiative’s Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing Task Force formed in the summer of 2023 is a pivotal effort that collaborates with the SEMI Sustainability Initiative. The task force provides the “how” to the “what” of corporate sustainability goals, focusing on a bottom-up approach that leverages various sensing technologies, at the cleanroom, sub-fab and facilities levels for both greenfield and brownfield device-making facilities, to enable predictive analytics.The task force is designed to be a driving force to encourage the industry’s shift from a fragmented, top-down approach – which does not address the increasing usage of carbon as device-making becomes more complex – to a more integrated, bottom-up strategy. The task force has created a roadmap based on three pillars comprising connecting, sensing, and predicting technologies, which are meant to be cumulative and could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint for making microelectronics like semiconductors. The task force participants believe this to be the first industry roadmap to address all areas of fab processing, leveraging Industry 4.0/5.0, including AI for the purpose of enhancing the sustainability of operations.The task force’s roadmap is comprehensive and includes a variety of sensing technologies, digital twin methodologies, and machine learning/AI techniques for reducing Scope 1 (direct, process-based) and Scope 2 (indirect, energy-related) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water usage and material waste. Once the roadmap is completed, factory management can prioritize the implementation of best practices based on the quantified impact factors of specified use cases. The roadmap outlines methodologies for brownfield and greenfield fabs separately based on practical capex and implementation recommendations.The task force has finalized its assessment of practical solutions for reducing Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, and it is now addressing water usage best practices before addressing material waste later this year and into 2025. SEMI will publish separate white papers regarding Scope 1 and 2 as a precursor to offering the roadmap as a customized tool for fabs.The semiconductor manufacturing industry stands at an inflection point from a sustainability perspective. Consider this: U.S. CHIPS Act funding is set to support 19 greenfield fabs, which collectively will consume the equivalent of 11 Empire State Buildings’ worth of steel. That’s a monumental environmental impact. Additionally, the Q2 2024 SEMI World Fab Forecast is tracking approximately 104 new fabs worldwide coming online between 2023 and 2027. Each of these fabs requires significant amounts of concrete, steel, and construction equipment, all with their own GHG footprints. This all represents a challenge that the industry must grapple with head-on.Furthermore, there is the energy-intensive nature of large semiconductor fabs, the cost implications of renewable power acquisition, and the substantial water usage by medium and mega-sized fabs. The main mission of the task force is to create an industry roadmap—a practical blueprint—for device makers to invest in sustainability, following a systematic, bottom-up approach.Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing at SEMICON West At the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion at SEMICON WEST 2024 , a special session centered around the key components of the Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing Task Force roadmap. Task force leaders helped coordinate a unique session to showcase the roadmap findings and detailed case studies for Scope 1 and 2 emissions. The session included speakers from Deloitte, Linkan Engineering, Micron, Solvay, Spectrum Environmental Services, and ULVAC.Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing Session at SEMICON West 2024The opening keynote by Adeline Tay of Micron covered the company’s pioneering efforts to improve sustainability in semiconductor manufacturing. Tay highlighted how to enable a net-zero transition sooner via smart manufacturing technologies including digital twins, real-time power monitoring and optimization, lower global warming potential gas usage, and emission data visibility.The next presentation by Brian Coppa (Task Force Co-Chair) of ULVAC [1] revealed the findings of the SEMI task force roadmap, which described the most critical technologies to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions and quantified them with respect to impact level to help fab managers prioritize budget allocation for meeting related sustainability goals at the cleanroom, sub-fab and facilities levels. Coppa provided estimates on the substantial decreases in emissions that can be achieved (see Figure 1) using the compilation of recommended technologies (i.e. predictive analytics such as AI, machine learning and predictive maintenance) that are outlined in the task force roadmap. Figure 1: Task force roadmap estimates for the emissions reduction potential for Scope 1 and 2, respectively.Jake Townsend of Deloitte [2] followed and underlined the industry’s sustainability challenge with regards to chip-making carbon footprint and the opportunities from design to fab, to sub-fab and facilities. Townsend presented that the industry’s water management carbon footprint is estimated to be at least 2 orders of magnitude higher by weight compared to consumer products such as a car or hamburger.Next, Steve Hall of Spectrum Environmental Solutions [3] discussed how compliance testing and measurements differ from common GHG reporting, which is calculation based. The Electronics Code for Federal Regulations 40CFR 98 Subpart 1 now requires the electronics industry to report both calculated emission factors and smokestack measurements. Hall showed the benefits of Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) monitoring at the smokestack level and the accuracy it can provide for reporting.Michael Peter Pitroff of Solvay [4] provided an in-depth case study on how the F2-based cleaning gas Solvaclean® can replace SF6 chemistries for chamber cleans, facilitated by in-situ gas monitoring techniques, to reduce Scope 1 emissions in plasma etch and deposition processes. Pitroff covered the financial and throughput impacts of the replacement and described how higher global warming potential (GWP) gases can be replaced with low GWP gases in Bosch wafer etch processes.Finally, Drew Horseman of Linkan Engineering [5] presented innovations in water treatment for the semiconductor industry. Horseman covered current state-of-the-art, energy-efficient reverse osmosis (RO) systems and addressed specific benefits of RO optimization. He showed how data acquisition and analytics are the first step to eventually reaching zero-liquid-discharge (ZLD), which is the future of sustainable water treatment.Get Involved!Overall, the Smart Sustainability session at the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion at SEMICON West 2024 enlightened many attendees on how smart manufacturing technologies like AI can help advance sustainability in semiconductor manufacturing using a more scalable, automated approach. Visit the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Initiative homepage to learn more about upcoming activities and contact [email protected] to get involved in the task force.Amit Srivastava is Manager, Data Science- Smart Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence at Micron Technology, Brian Coppa is Product Engineering Lead at ULVAC, and they lead the SEMI Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing Task Force. Mark da Silva is Senior Director of the Smart Manufacturing Initiative and APHI Technology Community at SEMI. Topics: Smart Manufacturing , SEMI Smart Manufacturing Initiative , semiconductor manufacturing , Digital Twin standards , manufacturing productivity , Digital Twin framework , manufacturing efficiency , semiconductor industry , semiconductor ecosystem, sustainability , SEMICON West , decarbonization , Semiconductor Climate Consortium , greenhouse gas emissionsReferences from the Smart Sustainability Session at Smart Manufacturing Pavilion available to SEMICON West 2024 attendees: SEMI Smart Sustainability Roadmap: Blueprint for Device MakersGreen Chips are the New Blue-Chip InvestmentMeeting Net Zero Manufacturing Challenges with Real-Time Monitoring of Exhaust Laterals in Sub-FabsSolvaClean as replacement of SF6 in cleaning and etchingInnovations in Water Treatment: Exhibiting the Importance of Data in Sustainable Process Development
