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December 18, 2023

Sustainability as an Opportunity for Semiconductor Product Innovation

By Alua Suleimenova, ESG Program Manager, Marvell

The annual United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 taking place this year in Dubai has brought technology under the sustainability spotlight. In an era of rapid technological advancement, digitalization and proliferation of AI, environmental impacts of technology cannot be overlooked. The semiconductor industry is now at a unique juncture: the global demand for semiconductor products is growing rapidly alongside increasing pressure to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Reducing emissions from semiconductor product manufacturing remains the most effective and preferred response measure to climate change for many companies. At the same time, addressing upstream climate impacts alone would not represent a comprehensive picture. Semiconductor companies are increasingly embracing sustainable product design and prioritize power reduction both intrinsically in the products themselves and extrinsically - by collaborating with their customers around energy efficiency in the data infrastructure systems in which the semiconductor products are deployed.

Marvell Circuit Board

For Marvell, this means addressing our largest source of GHG emissions, those associated with the direct use phase of our products once they make their way to end customers. This emission hotspot - also known as Scope 3 Category 11 - represents over 90 percent of our total company-wide GHG emissions. Any system containing Marvell chips – from a 5G base station to a large data center – consumes electricity during its full operational cycle.

Focusing on power efficiency is not just essential for tackling our carbon footprint – it is a business imperative. Our customers demand products that enable them to consume less power for more performance. Although power has always been part of our innovation and R&D process, this has become an even greater priority for the company.

To reduce electricity consumption in the use phase of our products, we have been integrating power efficiency considerations in the design of all products in our portfolio. This includes increasing performance to density, moving to new technology nodes, consolidating features onto more integrated chips, applying novel architectures, improving thermal management to reduce cooling, employing power management, and using virtualization innovations to more efficiently utilize data infrastructure.

Scaling power reduction initiatives across the company and tackling product power reduction in a consistent and reliable manner for thousands of products in our portfolio required us to develop a new approach to how we collect, track and manage our product power data. Last year, we established a new internal working group with a specific focus on Responsible Product Design. Its first priority was to mobilize the implementation of R&D solutions targeting product power across the company. We also established a centralized system of power data collection and management at a product level.

In collaboration with product teams, we established our direct-use emission baseline to better understand the current downstream impacts of our products. We also developed forward-looking projections for products that are expected to come online in the coming years. By considering power use of product, its guaranteed lifetime, current and projected sales volumes, as well as the location of its end use (which affects the emission factors associated with electricity production), we were able to estimate product-level current and future direct-use emissions. These insights helped us to develop our carbon reduction roadmap based on product-specific data rather than assumptions and industry-level estimates, and provided the basis for a forward-looking model that we plan to update regularly as we identify and implement new power reduction initiatives.

To enhance synergies between power reduction for decarbonization and broader business strategy for our technology, we are leveraging the expertise, ingenuity and creativity of our engineers through internal Innovation Contests and our IP submission process. Marvell engineers develop ideas for our target markets and domains in which our company is actively engaged, and help improve or innovate internal tools, flow optimizations and software or product concept developments.

SCC Founding Member

Power efficiency is a crucial factor in reducing carbon emissions during the product use phase, and it is a critical consideration in semiconductor product design. With an anticipated increase in energy consumption in the future, decarbonization at a value chain level also requires the evolution of the current energy infrastructure and the scaling up of greening of regional and national electric grids. The Asia-Pacific region, which is home to many semiconductor manufacturers, has been historically lacking access to renewable energy sources. To address this issue, SEMI and the Semiconductor Climate Consortium have formed the new Energy Collaborative that was launched at COP28. Marvell is proud to be a member of the Semiconductor Climate Consortium, and we are excited to see the Energy Collaborative and other initiatives led by the Consortium aligning the industry on best practices and pushing companies to take more ambitious climate action.  

 

Tags: ESG

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