From Measurement to Impact: How Life Cycle Assessment is Shaping Sustainable Semiconductor Manufacturing
The semiconductor industry is evolving rapidly, powered by AI, advanced technologies, and growing global demand. Alongside this growth, another challenge is becoming impossible to ignore: sustainability.
In a recent webinar hosted by the GENESIS EU, experts from imec, including Hania Zarafshani and Cédric Rolin, explored how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is helping the industry understand and reduce its environmental impact.
Why Sustainability Is Now a Core Challenge
Climate change is no longer a distant issue. It is a present reality shaping how industries operate. Rising CO₂ levels and increasing global temperatures are pushing organisations to rethink not just how they innovate, but how sustainable those innovations are.
The semiconductor industry sits at the centre of this transition. On one hand, it enables greener technologies across sectors, such as electrification, smart systems, and digital solutions. On the other hand, it must also reduce its own environmental footprint.
This dual responsibility makes one thing clear: sustainability must be measured, not assumed.
Sustainability Is Not a Label, It’s a Measurement
One of the strongest messages from the webinar was simple but powerful.
Sustainability is not something you claim. It is something you measure.
Many decisions that seem environmentally friendly depend on context. One solution might reduce carbon emissions but increase resource use or chemical impact. Without a structured way to evaluate these trade-offs, it is difficult to know what is truly sustainable.
This is where Life Cycle Assessment becomes essential.
What Is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
LCA is a standardized method used to measure environmental impact across the entire lifecycle of a product, from raw materials to manufacturing and beyond.
It follows four main steps:
Goal and Scope: Define what you want to study and how
Inventory: Collect data on energy, materials, water, and emissions
Impact Assessment: Translate data into environmental indicators
Interpretation: Identify hotspots and improvement opportunities
The process is iterative, meaning it is refined as better data becomes available.
Why LCA Matters for Semiconductors
Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most complex industrial processes in the world. Producing a single chip involves hundreds or even thousands of steps, along with significant use of energy, water, and chemicals.
Using LCA helps to:
Compare technologies fairly
Identify where the biggest environmental impacts occur
Avoid shifting problems from one area to another
Support better engineering and design decisions
In short, LCA turns sustainability into something engineers can work with in practice.
Inside the Fab: Where the Impact Comes From
During the webinar, imec presented how LCA is applied to real semiconductor manufacturing using their bottom-up modelling approach, imec.netzero.
This approach analyses the entire fabrication process, including:
Equipment and process steps
Energy consumption
Water usage, including ultra-pure water systems
Chemical inputs, including PFAS
Emissions and waste
The results provide a detailed, data-driven view of environmental impact at the fab level.
Key Insights from the Webinar
Several important findings emerged from the session.
Manufacturing drives the footprint
For many electronic devices, a large share of emissions comes from manufacturing, especially from integrated circuits.
More advanced chips increase impact
As technology becomes more advanced, process steps increase, energy demand rises, water usage grows, and overall environmental impact increases.
Electricity is a growing factor
Energy use, particularly electricity, is becoming one of the biggest contributors to emissions in advanced fabs.
It’s not just about carbon
While climate change is a major concern, other factors such as resource use, water consumption, and chemical impact are also critical.
Looking Beyond Carbon
The webinar emphasised that focusing only on carbon emissions is not enough.
Using broader frameworks, such as the European Commission’s Environmental Footprint (EF 3.1), allows the industry to evaluate multiple environmental impacts at once. This helps ensure that improving one area does not create problems in another.
Challenges to Overcome
Despite its value, applying LCA in semiconductor manufacturing is not straightforward.
Some of the key challenges include:
Limited availability of high-quality data
Confidentiality of industrial processes
Complexity of global supply chains
Differences across technologies and regions
Addressing these challenges requires collaboration across industry, research, and policy, which is a core focus of the GENESIS project.
A Clear Takeaway
The webinar concluded with a simple but important idea.
To measure is to know.
If the semiconductor industry wants to build a sustainable future, it must first understand its impact clearly, consistently, and at scale.
Life Cycle Assessment provides the tools to do exactly that.
