Development of an interactive platform for analysing the environmental impacts of semiconductor systems

Context

The semiconductor industry is growing rapidly, as society becomes increasingly digitalized, connected, and electrified. At the same time, continued improvements in chip performance require increasingly complex manufacturing processes, involving more process steps, materials and chemicals, and purity requirements. Those trends are compounding the industry’s energy, water, and material consumption, as well as its waste and emissions.

To integrate environmental sustainability “by design” into chip technology development, imec collaborates with key players from across the value chain to assess and improve the sustainability of the semiconductor industry. This endeavour requires a tool able to estimate the impacts from making chips, their packaging options, and their assembly into complex systems. This is why imec develops imec.netzero, a software platform that simulates high-volume manufacturing semiconductor fabs and assembly lines, quantifying all related flows (materials, energy, water, emissions) and their environmental impacts. This tool quantifies the impact of existing and emerging technologies, determines key environmental hotspots, and evaluates mitigation options. It is consequently actively used by the industry to develop and execute sustainability strategies.

Objective

The objective of this internship is to design and implement an intuitive modelling environment for complex semiconductor device systems (such as systems-on-chip, chiplets, GPU boards, and 3D-stacked systems) in imec.netzero. The engineers using the tool should be able to seamlessly create and save their own systems in the application, visualize environmental impact hotspots, and explore alternative designs. The core challenge to solve is to represent the wide decision space of system definitions with an intuitive UI, while achieving high code quality and maintainable software architecture.

Responsibilities

You will actively engage in the design, coding, and testing of the custom system modelling platform. This will involve working closely with our research team to understand the nuances of semiconductor manufacturing, packaging, and assembly. You will integrate into the software development team, engaging in software project organization, architecture discussions, and code maintainability. You will perform user research and gather feedback to further improve the UI/UX design.

Who you are:

Applicants are expected to have some experience (and are motivated to enhance their skills) in the following areas:

• Programming (Python & JavaScript)
• Professional software engineering (architecture, documentation, clean code)
• Data visualization techniques
• User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) design
• [Optional] Semiconductor device manufacturing processes (optional)
• [Optional] Environmental impact assessment