Case Study

TechInsights’ Sustainability Tools Used to Drive Down Carbon Emissions in the Supply Chain

Sustainability is an increasing strategic objective across the semiconductor industry. It presents a high-value problem that affects the entire supply chain in how they design, manufacture, package, and transport chips. One forwarding-thinking and leading fabless semiconductor company, a long-standing customer of TechInsights, is moving fast to quantify the GHG implications upstream in the supply chain, while meeting customer requirements for carbon reporting downstream.

Drive Down Carbon Emissions in the Supply Chain

The Challenge

This fabless vendor was up against a tight deadline to deliver a full cradle-to-gate carbon emissions analysis of nearly 100 integrated circuits (ICs) to satisfy several customers’ reporting requirements. Without the proper data tools, developing a full life cycle assessment for a single product can be a prolonged and complicated effort. The challenge was pulling together the raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, and transportation emissions in a consumable, efficient way.

This organization needed to fast-track the collection, integration, and calculations to complete a cradle-to-gate analysis for multiple products and the associated die within. The core team was tasked with finding a partner who could rapidly deliver with confidence details on the raw materials used in the ICs, specific manufacturing processes in specific fab locations, as well as the assembly and test (i.e. packaging) of the IC, and finally the transportation to the electronics manufacturing services provider.

The Solution

TechInsights’ Sustainability suite of products based on a legacy of evidence-based technical analysis and deep semiconductor manufacturing expertise, paired with a robust database of semiconductor carbon footprints of more than 200,000 chips, and over 29,000 packages, was the answer this organization needed. TechInsights’ 30+ year history of reverse engineering and teardown of leading-edge technology means die and package dimensions, package types, dies per IC, and manufacturing processes and tools used – paired with carbon emissions data and calculations - are available in one place to run an analysis and generate a cradle-to-gate analysis.

TechInsights’ EcoInsights portfolio of Sustainability tools and insights – including the semiconductor Manufacturing Carbon Module and Packaging+ Carbon Module - proved to have all the semiconductor sustainability information needed for this organization to meet its customer deliverables with speed. Some of the outputs provided included:

Scope 1, 2, and 3 die emissions (manufacturing)
Scope 2 and 3 assembly emissions
Scope 2 test emissions
Scope 3 transportation emissions
Plus, water consumption during both the manufacturing and assembly stages.

The automated tool allows users to run scenarios, and adjust assumptions with proprietary information, to provide standardized and repeatable semiconductor emissions reporting for integrated circuits from raw materials to manufacturing to the assembly and test, and finally the transportation to deliver the parts to their destination.

The Results

TechInsights’ EcoInsights products helped this organization reduce the time from months to minutes to create a life cycle analysis of specific ICs. Not only is time to generate a cradle-to-gate a fraction of initial estimates, but the cost to conduct this analysis in terms of internal resources or using external ESG consultants becomes negligible – and is scalable and repeatable across multiple products.

More importantly, providing this valuable insight to this best-in-class customer, helps drive better reporting and visibility of the semiconductor carbon footprint implications across the supply chain – which leads to more open dialogue about driving change for a greener future.