2024 Report

October 30, 2024

Today is World Sustainability Day. “World Sustainability Day, celebrated annually on the last Wednesday of October, is a global initiative dedicated to raising awareness about sustainability and the importance of adopting practices that protect the environment for future generations. This day focuses on promoting sustainable development, reducing carbon footprints, conserving natural resources, and encouraging individuals, businesses, and governments to act responsibly in preserving the planet.”

At SRC, we would like to use this opportunity to publicly share the actions we have taken throughout the past year to align our strategy, effort, and investments to this accountable mission and build upon the momentum created by SRC’s Commitment to Sustainability, established in 2021.

To further educate and inform our community, we published a series of articles this year on sustainability in the semiconductor industry. These articles highlight the reasons, methods, and impact of SRC and the semiconductor industry's crucial role in promoting a sustainable planet.

Why The Semiconductor Industry Cares About Sustainability

This article highlights the semiconductor industry’s commitment to sustainability, emphasizing the need to balance technological advancements with environmental responsibility. The industry faces significant challenges, such as high energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from data centers and network services. Through academic research, SRC is leading efforts to develop greener materials, energy-efficient chips, and sustainable manufacturing processes to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and reduce the industry’s carbon footprint for its industry members.

The Sustainability Yardstick

Learn about the importance of measuring and managing the carbon footprint of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, which is driven by innovations in microelectronics and advanced packaging technology (MAPT). The sector’s growth, projected to reach $1 trillion, comes with increased emissions, necessitating coordinated efforts to achieve sustainability. The article explains the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard, which categorizes emissions into three scopes and highlights the need for comprehensive strategies to reduce the ICT sector’s environmental impact.

Sustainable Semiconductor Manufacturing: Is it Within Reach?

We investigate the environmental challenges faced by the semiconductor industry, particularly focusing on emissions and the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are widely used in semiconductor manufacturing due to their unique properties, but they pose significant environmental and health risks because they are persistent and bioaccumulative. The industry is under pressure to find safer alternatives and improve abatement technologies to reduce PFAS emissions. The article also highlights the industry’s efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, which are substantial due to the energy-intensive nature of semiconductor fabrication. Collaborative efforts between industry, academia, and consortia like SRC are crucial in developing sustainable solutions. Despite ongoing innovative research, the article notes that achieving full environmental sustainability and regulatory compliance will require significantly more funding and coordinated efforts.

As highlighted in the 2022 report, 66% of the new projects we began funding that year aligned with SRC’s commitment to sustainability. For new projects starting in 2024, about $53M (or 53%) of the SRC research investment portfolio is dedicated to building efficient computing systems. As noted in both the Decadal Plan and MAPT roadmap, these improvements are necessary to keep pace with the growing demands of the ICT industry. In 2021, the Decadal Plan for Semiconductors developed a model for total energy consumption by computing. The main conclusion was that energy is a big and rapidly growing problem for ICT.

Further analysis led to updates in 2024, which show that the world’s total compute energy is growing even faster than the 2021 predictions, mainly due to the widespread use of artificial intelligence. The plot below shows that the energy consumed by computing is climbing towards the world’s total energy production at an increasing rate, thus highlighting the urgency of developing efficient energy computing systems. In addition to energy-efficient computing, SRC’s commitment to sustainability enables pioneering work within power electronics, product design, communications, and manufacturing that addresses key challenges highlighted in the Sustainability and Energy Efficiency Chapter of the MAPT Roadmap. 

One notable research project led by Professor Chris Kim from the University of Minnesota has been recognized with the prestigious SRC Sustainable Future Award for 2024. This award honors his team's innovative work in developing an Ising solver chip, which efficiently addresses complex optimization problems such as scheduling and logistics. By integrating quantum computing principles with standard CMOS technology, the chip mimics qubit behavior using classical devices, resulting in faster computations and significantly lower energy consumption. This groundbreaking research, published in Nature in August 2023, offers better scalability and operates on a fraction of the power required by conventional quantum systems.

TECHCON 2024 was yet another milestone in our ongoing journey towards achieving our goals. Held in Austin Texas in September of this year, this premier event showcased innovative solutions to address the ICT industry’s future challenges. The event featured projects by SRC scholars and attracted attendees from industry, academia, and government across six exciting sessions. The number of sessions and topics discussed increased significantly by 65%, reflecting SRC’s emphasis on sustainability within its research portfolio, which aligns with its three pillars. Topics included environmentally sustainable technologies in semiconductor manufacturing, such as green alternatives to harmful chemicals, advanced water treatment, and plasma-assisted degradation of PFAS. The sessions also explored cutting-edge semiconductor developments like ferroelectric capacitors for machine learning and high-throughput screening of 2D materials for ultra-high mobility semiconductors. Additionally, the event highlighted green advanced packaging solutions and discussed sustainability and energy efficiency in AI systems, focusing on reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint.  

SRC recognizes that young students and early career professionals should continue to explore opportunities to address sustainability challenges and uses platforms such as webinars and panel discussions to reach out to the next generation of talent. We provided a great opportunity during our Earth Day webinar, Semiconductor Careers: Shaping the Future of Earth Day (21 April 2024). During this vibrant event, industry experts, including veteran David Robertson (Analog Devices) and recent graduate Paige Jacob (formerly Intel, now PFAS Program Manager at Natcast), shared their experiences, highlighting the significance of collaboration and continuous learning in sustainable semiconductor technology. The discussion showcased efforts to reduce water consumption and encouraged students to pursue internships and research in sustainable technology. The event concluded with a hopeful outlook on the future of sustainable innovation, stressing the need for ongoing collaboration between academia and industry.

Currently, corporate citizens are investing a modest $1 million per year into academic research aimed at finding alternatives to PFAS, GWP gases, and improving water and electricity conservation. Unfortunately, this effort is not having the significant impact the industry hoped for. Historical evidence in the field of academic research initiatives such as DARPA ERI, SRC JUMP, and JUMP 2.0 has shown that at least $50M over the period of 5 years is required to have critical mass engagement in solving complex problems. SRC supports the semiconductor industry’s efforts, driven by entities such as Natcast, to invest in the critical needs in this space. The recently announced PRISM program aims to improve the environmental sustainability of semiconductor manufacturing by addressing PFAS challenges. It leverages collaborative R&D to develop solutions for PFAS analysis, sensing, abatement, and modeling, focusing on overcoming current limitations and creating end-to-end mitigation capabilities that can be quickly implemented without changing existing production technologies. The program is backed by significant funding, with a total of up to $35 million available and individual awards ranging from $250,000 to $8 million, highlighting the importance of this investment.

In conclusion, on the World Sustainability Day, SRC reaffirms its commitment to sustainability through a range of initiatives. These include substantial investments in research and development of energy-efficient computing systems and sustainable semiconductor manufacturing. Our commitment to sustainability will continue to drive the research agenda to deliver greener materials and processes for semiconductor manufacturing, create semiconductor chips and packages with radically improved energy efficiency, and revolutionize the efficiency of future ICT systems at scale.

In partnership,

Dr. Todd Younkin, President and CEO

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