Carbon footprint monitoring across our semiconductor supply chains

The environmental impact of semiconductor manufacturing poses an important challenge for our industry, to meet net zero targets by 2050. Imec is taking different actions at the design level, but also at the manufacturing level, in the Fab. We improve and disrupt fab processes to reduce their environmental footprint in the SSTS program and our AI department is not only looking into steering processes towards more efficiency and quality, but also towards optimizing the environmental impact.

Besides focusing on what happens in the Fab, we must also monitor and optimize the carbon footprint of our supply chains. A significant amount of our environmental impact is caused due to the GHG (Green House Gasses) emissions generated by our upstream and downstream supply chain. This requires close collaboration, between all the partners involved and a joint data strategy on sharing the carbon footprint data in a trusted, secure and verifiable way.

A decentralized, interoperable and trusted data exchange in a data ecosystem of supply chain partners, has proven it’s value for optimizing supply chain resilience & efficiency in different sectors, like automotive and logistics. Imec is exploring how these data space innovations can also steer the semiconductor sector towards end-to-end transparency about their total and actual environmental impact. The research involves the governance, technical building blocks and additional data security layers, that can create the necessary amount of trust, interoperability and scalability.