SE Accelerating Sustainability With Smart Manufacturing

Post by **admin** » Thu Jul 16, 2026 7:01 am

By Brian J. Coppa, Amit Srivastava, Mark da Silva, and Anshu Bahadur The SEMI Smart Manufacturing Initiative is a global effort focused on leveraging the most advanced technology to enhance productivity of electronics manufacturing facilities. Among the key technology advances this group seeks to promote is the value of implementing Industry 4.0/5.0 technology to deliver increased return-on-investment (ROI). A recent white paper published by the initiative focused on the productivity improvements that can be achieved by the formation of digital twins in semiconductor plants [1]; however, sustainability was not the focus, providing an opportunity for future pre-competitive work. To address this, the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Initiative formed the “Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing” task force in 2023 to benchmark industry best practices that enable manufacturing facilities to meet their sustainability goals faster. The roadmap would complement the SEMI Sustainability Initiative by following a bottom-up approach to identifying the industry’s best practices. The task force primarily focused on fab device production, which is widely seen as the largest driver of the microelectronics industry’s Scope 1–2 emissions, water use and hazardous waste consumption, versus other branches of the supply chain. This task force developed a comprehensive solutions-based Scope 1 (process-based, direct) and Scope 2 (energy-based, indirect) emissions roadmap, incorporating the Connecting, Sensing and Predicting pillars developed by the Smart Manufacturing Initiative [2], and applied them at cleanroom, subfab and facilities levels for brownfield device-making facilities. While these phases are meant to be cumulative for maximum impact on targeted sustainability metrics, the SEMI task force understands that not every fab that applies the roadmap as a tool for sustainability purposes will advance use cases all the way to the Predicting phase. Moreover, special use cases are defined for greenfield fabs in a separate section of the roadmap, covering new infrastructure and more disruptive changes to existing operations to guide streamlined deployment. These key features are the foundation used to develop the first half of the roadmap for addressing Scope 1 and 2 emissions, leveraging Industry 4.0/5.0 technology, and published as a collaborative SEMI white paper [2]. The second half of the roadmap presented at SEMICON West 2025 [3] is covered in this latest white paper [4] and follows the same methodology though focused on reducing water consumption and hazardous waste in device-making fabs.

Altogether, both SEMI white papers comprise the first comprehensive semiconductor industry roadmap covering carbon emissions, water and hazardous waste, while emphasizing the benefits of smart technology. The roadmap numerically rates each innovative use case in terms of relative impact on reducing a fab baseline void of smart elements and based on technology readiness level (TRL) with respect to future production capability. This functional roadmap will be available soon to the industry as a customizable model, denoted as the SEMI Smart Sustainability Model (SSM), wherein users can estimate sustainability gains by applying some or all listed use cases based on the nature of the facility’s sustainability profile and goals (i.e. relative proportion of water consumption sources at all levels of their operation, by adjusting weighted impact factors in the model). A base case assessment of proportional resource consumption representing an industry average 300mm fab, based on published data and task force estimates, is provided for fabs without detailed tracking to constitute the SEMI Smart Sustainability Roadmap. Many sustainability organizations across the semiconductor industry are focused on problem-based assessments, which often highlight water scarcity or total industry carbon footprint growth, and this can lead to IDMs, foundries, OSATs and others in the supply chain tackling sustainability from an isolated, project-based perspective. Moreover, a top-down approach to sustainability in fabs does not scale as well as a bottom-up approach to counteract the issue of increasing device process complexity and the larger associated process flow, requiring a higher amount of carbon emissions, water and hazardous waste, which needs to be addressed. For instance, a purchase power agreement for renewable energy is determined based on a finite amount of expected fab energy usage. However, energy-efficiency aided by AI across all levels of the fab is much more scalable, as a fab expands or additional process steps are added per product. Therefore, a data-driven approach, tracking emissions, water, and waste and linking technologies to future targets, is most effective, making this roadmap unique in scope and approach. A unified fab-wide data platform leveraging digital twins can further improve outcomes by linking water and waste metrics with downstream KPIs like recycling rates. The roadmap’s best practices can apply to any device-making fab, as it relies on Industry 4.0/5.0 technologies rather than compromising process flows as in alternative fab sustainability models. ROI benefits identified include cost-savings on process materials, utilities, regulatory, and labor plus higher yield and shorter cycle time after implementation. In summary, the use cases within the customizable model are quantified based on normalized impact to the current baseline level so that device-makers can benchmark themselves and prioritize investment in the most effective technologies to meet their sustainability goals. For future updates on the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Initiative, including the upcoming SSM product release, please visit the Initiative’s website. To learn more about the roadmap, download prior white papers:

White Paper 1: Accelerating Sustainability with SEMI Smart Manufacturing
White Paper 2: Accelerating Sustainability with SEMI Smart Manufacturing: AI Roadmap for Device Makers Part II

References:

M. da Silva and K. Somani, “Digital Twins in Semiconductor Manufacturing,” SEMI, Milpitas, CA, 2024.
B. Coppa, A. Srivastava and M. da Silva, “Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing: Roadmap for Device Makers,” SEMI white paper (Available here) – November 2024.
B. Coppa, A. Srivastava, “SEMI Smart Sustainability Roadmap Part II: AI Blueprint for Device Makers,” at SEMICON West, October 2025.
B. Coppa & A. Srivastava, “Accelerating Sustainability with Smart Manufacturing: AI Roadmap for Device Makers Part II” SEMI white paper (Available here) – May 2026

Brian J. Coppa is product engineering lead at ULVAC. Amit Srivastava is staff program manager for Smart Manufacturing & AI at Micron. Mark da Silva is senior director, Manufacturing Coalitions at SEMI. Anshu Bahadur is senior program manager, Technology Coalitions at SEMI. The post Accelerating Sustainability With Smart Manufacturing appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Source: https://semiengineering.com/acceleratin ... facturing/