Semiconductor Sustainability Needs a Whole-Fab View, Not a Point-of-Use Fix

By PETE SINGER, Editor-in-Chief, Semiconductor Digest

Discussions of semiconductor sustainability tend to start and stop with high-global-warming-potential fluorinated gases coming off process tools. Chris Jones, environmental sustainability manager at Edwards, argues that framing misses most of what drives a fab’s environmental performance. “Considering the fab as an ecosystem, rather than just a tool with point-of-use abatement, is the starting point,” he said ahead of his SEMICON West presentation.

Jones connects issues usually discussed in isolation: Scope 1 emissions, abatement, reporting, water, waste, lifecycle carbon and supply chain pressure. Optimizing one element can simply move the impact elsewhere. Abatement destruction and removal efficiency (DRE) can’t be considered alone, because different abatement technologies carry their own electricity, fuel and NOx costs. He also flags an overlooked Scope 1 source, fugitive refrigerant from chillers, and notes that the subfab equipment Edwards and its competitors sell accounts for roughly 25% of a fab’s total energy use.

The throughline is that no single technology or metric tells the whole story. “The industry needs to move from individual metrics toward system-wide performance assessment,” Jones said.

Click here to read the full article in the SEMICON West Show Daily.

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