Technology companies increasingly demand reliable electronics LCA data to support Scope 3 accounting, science-based targets, and GHG mitigation strategies. However, the lack of current and aligned life cycle inventory (LCI) data for key components can cause discrepancies in LCA results, affecting corporate-level understanding of Scope 3 GHG mitigation priorities.
At the 2024 Electronics Goes Green conference, Aligned Incentives’ Chief Strategy Officer, Sarah Boyd, and coauthors shared insights on the opportunity to shift from outdated LCI datasets to newer data. Sarah also presented a practitioner’s guide to collecting representative semiconductor and IC data for effective LCA and decarbonization strategies.
Read the extended paper abstract below and fill out the form to download the presentation slides.
Paper title: The State of Electronics LCI Data: How to Address the Data Gaps
Authors:
Conference session: LCA – Tools & Databases
Extended abstract:
The demand for reliable electronics LCA data has grown among technology companies to support their activity-based Scope 3 accounting, science-based targets, and GHG mitigation strategies. A lack of current and aligned life cycle inventory (LCI) background data for key components can lead to discrepancies in electronics LCA results, which can carry over into corporate-level understanding of Scope 3 GHG mitigation priorities.
In the presentation, Sarah will highlight the opportunity to shift from outdated life cycle inventory datasets to newer data coming from IMEC’s Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies and Systems (SSTS) cross-industry partnership. She will provide a user’s guide to SSTS’s publicly available tool that provides more representative semiconductor manufacturing process data to inform effective LCA and decarbonization strategies.
According to the IPCC report, “Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis,” the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to an increase in global temperatures in 2011-2020 by 1.09°C from the average for 1850-1900. Per a meta-analysis of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) embodied carbon studies, the sector has been estimated at 1.8%-3.9% of global GHG emissions in 2020, or between 0.8 and 2.3 GtCO2e, with embodied emissions making up 230-550 MtCO2e. The semiconductor industry provides their own best estimate of semiconductor sector emissions at 500 MtCO2e in 2021, with cradle-to-gate comprising 185 MtonCO2e. This figure would put wafer fabrication at half of embodied emissions of the entire ICT sector. This apparent disconnect is explained by the fact that wafer fabrication emissions have been chronically undercounted in electronics carbon footprinting.
As ICT companies set net zero targets, it is critical to measure embodied carbon impacts accurately, but widely used life cycle inventory (LCI) data for semiconductor manufacturing are over a decade old, covering tech nodes from 350nm to 14 nm, or roughly up to 2016, while tech nodes in high volume manufacturing today extend to 3nm. The production impacts of semiconductor wafers at these nodes are substantially different, due to the increasing complexity of the production process required for more advanced nodes.
The release by imec of updated GHG emissions, energy and water use data for advanced semiconductor process nodes provides a much-needed update to available LCI data for wafer fabrication. These results have been modelled as a part of imec’s Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies and Systems (SSTS) initiative, convened to assess the environmental impacts of new technologies, identify high-impact processes and materials and define more sustainable semiconductor manufacturing solutions. The initiative has been highly collaborative, with members including fabless chip designers, chip makers as well as foundry, equipment and materials suppliers. SSTS has launched imec.netzero, a new, free to the public tool which provides users the capability to develop wafer inventory data. The imec.netzero tool provides the energy consumption, GHG emissions and water use (including water consumed in ultrapure water generation), based on the user’s choice of technology node, die size and fluorinated GHG (f-GHG) abatement status. Inventories are representative of industry-average processes for logic technology generations from 28nm through to the 3nm node. Users should take care that results from the tool do not include upstream embodied carbon from materials and consumables or the wafer substrate.
The tool shows that as much as 90% of direct (fab scope 1) GHG emissions come from fluorinated gases when these emissions are not controlled during electronic device manufacturing. Several types of point-of-use f-GHG abatement systems are available, including combustion and electrically heated plasma. The imec.netzero results show the importance of providing visibility on the installation of abatement units in value chain reporting, to better evaluate GHG management in chip manufacturing, as well as to more accurately model chip embodied carbon.
This session (by independent parties unaffiliated with imec) will highlight the urgency to transition from out-of-date LCI datasets to newer data for modeling wafer fabrication. The authors will provide outside-in guidance on how to use the imec.netzero tool, pointing to the importance of taking into account die size, yield (using default factors where this is not known) and f-GHG abatement installation levels.
The shift towards activity-based scope 3 accounting and SBTs, as part of product environmental disclosure regulations, necessitates up-to-date data for accurate reporting and industry decarbonization strategies. With mechanisms for digital product passports and maturation of corporate carbon reporting, collection of more accurate and actionable data for scope 3 carbon in ICT becomes more promising, however much work remains to be done.
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