Infineon is calculating the carbon footprint of its individual products, giving engineers more transparency regarding the climate impact of its chips.
www.electronicdesign.com, Jun. 24, 2024 –
Infineon Technologies is breaking down the carbon footprint of electronic devices to the component level, giving engineers the ability to compare its power switches and other product families based on their climate impact.
At PCIM, the annual power electronics trade show, Infineon said it would start sharing what it calls Product Carbon Footprint (PCF) data for its individual products. The company said the new metric would help customers make more sustainability-minded decisions during the design of a product. But without any industry-standard way for other companies to calculate the carbon footprint of their chips, comparing products from different vendors isn't in the cards yet.
For Infineon, a chip's carbon footprint spans the whole supply chain that produced it, from mining the precious metals and sourcing the other raw materials used to fabricate them, to shipping the finished product to electronics companies and other customers. The PCF metric is a snapshot of all carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions generated from one end of the process to the other. It's measured in equivalent kilograms of carbon dioxide (kg CO2e).
Every component in every electronic device has its own carbon footprint. But breaking down the carbon impact at the chip level turns out to be critical. As researchers at Harvard University figured out in a 2020 paper "most of the carbon output" from the average electronic device stems from manufacturing the chips inside instead of the electricity it consumes during use or what happens to it at the end of its life.
Elke Reichart, Infineon's chief sustainability officer, said the component-level data is "empowering our customers to reduce carbon emissions even more effectively" along the entire supply chain.
According to Infineon, it's calculating the carbon footprints of only about half its product portfolio at this point—everything from its families of silicon (Si), silicon carbide (SiC), and gallium nitride (GaN) power switching technologies to its automotive-grade microcontrollers (MCUs). But executives plan to eventually share data for Infineon's full product portfolio. The entire list of reference product families is here.
Understanding the Carbon Impact of Chip Manufacturing
The semiconductor industry has been trying to grapple with its huge carbon footprint in recent years.
Today, chip firms use vast amounts of electricity to mass-produce the chips at the heart of everything from fighter jets to automobiles to smartphones. They also use large quantities of chemicals, gases, and other raw materials to run the state-of-the-art equipment in their fabs. But nothing contributes more to a chip's carbon footprint than the electricity used to fabricate it, which in many cases is not generated by renewables.
More than 80% of the industry's carbon emissions stem from the use of electricity, typically generated by third parties and primarily used for manufacturing, according to a report by Boston Consulting Group and SEMI, a trade group for the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain.
Chipmaking is one of the most complicated and costly endeavors in the world of manufacturing. Before the chip itself is manufactured, silicon wafers are formed by melting down raw silicon, refining it, and shaping it into cylindrical rods of silicon. Huge furnaces are used in this process, and they can run at up to several thousand degrees and thus are very power-hungry. These rods of purified silicon must be then sliced into thin discs and polished to remove as many irregularities and impurities as possible before being shipped out to fabs that turn them into chips.