Understanding and reducing environmental impacts in semiconductor manufacturing through Life-Cycle Assessment

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 the complex supply chain and manufacturing processes involved. This is why imec develops imec.netzero, a virtual fab model that simulates high-volume manufacturing semiconductor device fabs, quantifying all related flows (materials, energy, water, emissions) and their environmental impacts across the lifecycle. This bottom-up model 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

In this internship, you will contribute to the Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) models inside imec.netzero, improving the completeness and robustness of chip manufacturing sustainability quantification. In particular, you will research and develop novel LCA models for aspects of chip manufacturing which are not comprehensively characterized today. Depending on your interest and background, possible topics include:

• Equipment and fab infrastructure manufacturing
• Supply chain for specialty gases or other high-purity materials
• Modelling cleanroom purity requirements or on-site gas fabrication (e.g. hydrogen)
• Direct emissions to air (or water) from semiconductor fabs (e.g. NOx, VOCs, PM)

Responsibilities

• You will align with the research team to select an LCA research gap to address (e.g. from the list above)
• You will research existing literature, models, and benchmarking data relevant to filling this gap
• You will develop LCA models, building on this evidence and justified assumptions
• You will document and present the resulting models to the research team and iterate based on their feedback
• Optional responsibilities based on student interest:
• You will implement your models directly into the imec.netzero codebase
• You will perform sensitivity analyses and propose impact mitigation options

Who you are:

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

• LCA for hotspot analysis and mitigation strategies
• Industrial process modelling or engineering, ideally in semiconductor manufacturing
• [Optional] Python programming