Semiconductors: Ushering in the Green Transition While Eating At Fossil Fuels
Much of today’s renewable energy wouldn’t be possible without semiconductors. They are a vital component of many types of renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar panels. In renewable energy technology, semiconductors harness, convert, and store various forms of renewable energy into usable electricity and feed them on the electric grid, where they can power society’s needs and infrastructure. Indeed, such is the importance of semiconductors to this technology that semiconductor consumption in the global renewable energy market is expected to grow by 8% to 10% annually. Clearly, they are vital to the world’s Green Transition to cleaner energy sources.
However, the use of semiconductors here is also paradoxical: despite being a vital part of renewable energy technology, semiconductor production is also heavily reliant on fossil fuels. To produce semiconductors, manufacturers consume extensive amounts of water and energy, which comes from fossil fuels such as natural gas and coal. In fact, various sources describe how the carbon footprint of semiconductor production is one of the largest across various industries. However, many efforts are underway to reduce the carbon footprint of the semiconductor industry, which is imperative to sustaining the world’s transition to renewable energy sources.
The specifics of Apple’s M1 chip (semiconductor)
As a result, some of the industry's most important end customers, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, have already committed to achieving net-zero emissions throughout their entire value chain within aggressive timeframes. In order to achieve substantial reductions in emissions, it will be necessary to collaborate with peers and suppliers, as well as to use new technologies, to innovate, and to engage the entire factory. By adjusting process parameters, such as chamber temperature and pressure, the semiconductor industry can reduce emissions. During optimization efforts, engineers often overlook these factors in favor of yields, partly because they lack the knowledge and operational experience necessary to identify strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is also possible that suppliers involved in daily tool operations and maintenance may prioritize cost and system reliability over greenhouse emissions and energy savings. By addressing knowledge gaps and collaborating more closely with tool suppliers, we may be able to improve emissions, such as optimizing yield and energy consumption simultaneously during cleaning procedures.
