The Environmental Footprint of IC Production: Review, Analysis and Lessons from Historical Trends

Pirson, Thibault [UCL] Delhaye, Thibault P. [UCL] Pip, Alex [UCL] Le Brun, Grégoire [UCL] Raskin, Jean-Pierre [UCL] Bol, David [UCL]

Given the ubiquity of electronic devices and the urgent need to decrease our footprint in the context of global warming and planetary boundaries, it becomes critical to better quantify the environmental impacts of integrated circuit (IC) production. Our work addresses this question in three successive steps. First, we carry out a review of the data available since 2010 from four different literature categories, i.e., foundry reports, industry roadmaps, scientific literature, and life-cycle assessment databases. Then, we leverage the 27 identified sources to perform both a qualitative and quantitative analysis. We propose 10 features for characterizing the scope of studies while focusing on environmental indicators normalized per cm2, i.e., energy consumption, carbon footprint and water consumption. The analysis results highlight a clear increasing trend of the environmental footprint with CMOS technology downscaling below 0.13 μm, despite a significant variation between the sources mainly due to scope mismatch. Finally, we show that environmental impacts per cm2 did not significantly decrease compared to historical values from 1980–2010, whereas the total silicon area produced keeps on increasing by 3.6%/year. Consequently, this work calls for urgently rethinking the road ahead with sobriety to effectively decrease the absolute environmental footprint of the IC production sub-sector.