Life-cycle assessment of semiconductor process equipment and maintenance

Context

Semiconductor manufacturing relies on highly specialised equipment for lithography, deposition, etching, ion implantation, thermal processing, cleaning, metrology, and inspection. These tools contain a wide range of materials and components, including structural metals, electronics, vacuum systems, pumps, robotics, precision optics, thermal systems, and control equipment.

The production of these tools, their transport and installation, and the parts and activities needed to maintain them all contribute to the environmental footprint of semiconductor manufacturing. However, detailed physical inventories for semiconductor process equipment are rarely available. Equipment impacts are therefore often excluded from life-cycle assessments or estimated using generic factors that do not reflect differences between tool types, materials, manufacturing requirements, or service life.

Maintenance is another part of the equipment lifecycle that is often poorly represented. Replacement parts, repair, refurbishment, service activities, transport, and waste treatment can all add to the impact of a tool over its lifetime. The size of this contribution depends on how the equipment is designed, how often parts are replaced, whether components can be repaired or refurbished, and how long the equipment remains in use.

This project will develop a traceable life-cycle model that makes the environmental impact of semiconductor process equipment and maintenance an explicit part of semiconductor LCA. The model will allow equipment design, lifetime, maintenance, and refurbishment choices to be linked directly to their environmental impact per processed wafer.

Objective

The objective of this project is to develop and implement a modular life-cycle model of semiconductor process equipment and maintenance for imec.netzero. The model will cover the main equipment families and maintenance activities across the equipment fleet, with more detailed modelling for the tools and components that contribute most to environmental impact or uncertainty. It will include equipment production, installation, maintenance, replacement, refurbishment, and end-of-life, with impacts allocated over equipment lifetime and processed-wafer throughput.

Responsibilities

You will collaborate with the sustainability team and, where possible, process-equipment, maintenance, procurement, and supplier specialists to collect the data required for the LCA and support its implementation in imec.netzero.

In practice, this will involve:

• Reviewing equipment studies, supplier documentation, specifications, maintenance records, and environmental data.
• Preparing and checking the data used in the LCA.
• Building and running the equipment and maintenance calculations.
• Analysing the results and identifying the main environmental contributors.

Skills and Learning Objectives

Experience with life-cycle assessment is required. Familiarity with semiconductor equipment, industrial machinery, bills of materials, maintenance, reliability engineering, or environmental product data is an advantage.

• Applying LCA to semiconductor process equipment
• Working with equipment, component, and maintenance data
• Allocating equipment impacts over lifetime and production throughput
• Assessing uncertainty and comparing improvement options