IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2023 - 164

ISSCC 2023 Evening Event: The Path to Sustainable IC Ecosystems
S
Sustainability has become a major
concern in our lives-in general
and all of the way to IC design.
It
has widened from energy management
to include greenhouse gas
emissions and pressure on natural
resources all along the product
lifecycle. These challenges must be
taken into account early in product
design phases, to rethink system
architecture and circuit techniques
to favor frugality and reuse, and to
minimize the impact of manufacturing.
A deep restructuration of the
IC ecosystem to integrate ecodesign
and reuse will need to arise, from either
top-down political intervention
or company-driven initiatives. This
panel, astutely moderated by Prof.
Massimo Alioto, National University
of Singapore,
investigated the options
to facilitate an economically
viable path to sustainable IC ecosystem,
through the views of six excellent
panelists.
Carole-Jean Wu, a research scientist
and technical lead manager at
Meta, highlighted the shift from operational
carbon footprint to embodied
carbon footprint. Broadly, carbon
emissions are categorized into two
components: the footprint from operational
energy consumption and the
footprint from hardware manufacturing
and infrastructure. With decades
of optimization efforts devoted to
energy efficiency optimization, the
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSSC.2023.3269449
Date of current version: 22 June 2023
dominating factor contributing to computing's
overall carbon footprint has
started shifting from operational
computations (operational carbon)
to hardware manufacturing and
infrastructures (embodied carbon).
This shift of the carbon footprint
bottleneck opens new directions
and development
opportunities for a sustainable
IC ecosystem.
Yogesh Ramadass, senior
director at Texas Instruments
(TI), stressed the relevance
of power conversion
efficiency from the grid to
the device. Electrical power
accounts for 40% of the
energy consumption in
the United States, with
a significant portion of
Ever-rising energy
for computing
versus global
energy production
is leaving
question marks
about sustaining
" superexponential
growth " for
information and
communication
technologies.
it flowing through a semiconductorbased
power converter before end
use. At the smaller energy scales, the
ubiquitous presence of electronics in
our everyday lives as handhelds and
autonomous devices brings with it the
need for ever-increasing amounts of
batteries. In this context, it becomes
crucial to innovate on higher efficiency
semiconductor materials and
circuit topologies together with battery-less
architectures and systems
for improved energy sustainability
and reduced reliance on natural resources.
At both the macro and micro
energy scales, the presence of standards
and initiatives requiring higher
efficiencies and removal of batteries
is accelerating the pace of innovation
needed toward creating a sustainable
semiconductor ecosystem.
Marcus Pan, science director of the
Semiconductor Research Corporation
(SRC), alerted on the challenges of sustained
growth of the semiconductor
market in a limited world-level energy
production envelope.
Ever-rising energy for
computing versus global
energy production is
leaving question marks
about sustaining " superexponential
growth " for
information and communication
technologies.
The surge of chip manufacturing
and packaged chip
volumes is putting additional
stress on our already-taxed
environment, including intensive
water consumption and hazardous
chemicals. As a collaborative
R&D community, we must reinvest the
ecosystem to carry early eco-friendly
technology adopters over the " Death
Valley " among academic research,
government regulations, and industrial
production. It is as a community
that scientists, designers, chipmakers,
chemists, and the tech industry
will push an innovative energy-saving
paradigm shift in next-generation
ICs and create new manufacturing
technologies that can reduce, reuse,
and recycle.
Todd Brady, chief sustainability
officer for Intel, highlighted the dual
efforts for the semiconductor market
to improve its own footprint
Carole-Jean Wu
Meta
Yogesh Ramadass
TI
Marcus Pan
SRC
Todd Brady
Intel
Andreia Cathelin
STMicroelectronics
Jo De Boeck
IMEC
Massimo Alioto
NUS
164 SPRING 2023
IEEE SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS MAGAZINE
IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Solid-States Circuits Magazine - Spring 2023
