Case studies
- Environmental responsibility
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Sharing with competitors for energy efficiency
 You are conscientious about saving energy at home: you turn off lights when you leave a room and lower the thermostat in the winter.
But what if you compared your energy and water bills with your neighbors or with the average residential usage in your town? Chances are you might see bills lower than your own and seek new ways to save more.
On a larger scale, semiconductor manufacturing facilities want to operate efficiently and save money, too. But until 2009, no program existed that would allow these types of facilities to compare notes on operating efficiency. That was when the idea for such a program benefiting the semiconductor industry, FABS21, was born. The program allows wafer fabrication (fab) facility managers to peek over each others' shoulders and share best practices.
"We think it will be a really important tool for us," said Paul Westbrook, TI's manager of sustainable development. "It helps us prioritize energy-efficiency projects and identify opportunities."
An industry-specific database
Westbrook led TI's involvement with FABS21, which grew in part out of his experience helping the company pursue Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certifications for new and existing buildings.
When researching the U.S. Green Building Council's (USGBC) requirements for the certification of existing buildings, he had hit a wall. The USGBC application asks for each existing building's U.S. EPA Energy Star rating, an external benchmark that rates how efficiently buildings use energy in comparison to similar buildings.
The problem: Energy Star was designed for office buildings, not fabs, which host more energy- and water-intensive operations.
"That was a huge red blinking light," Westbrook said.
So Westbrook and members of the Green Fabs Working Group, part of the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI), set out to develop an external energy- and water-use database specifically for the semiconductor industry. ISMI is a global semiconductor industry trade group. It partnered with engineers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop FABS21.
The program, unveiled in November, provides a set of common metrics that all fabs and assembly test sites can use. At the highest level, the analysis includes overall indices such as energy or water use per unit manufactured. Sites can drill down into specific metrics for individual systems as well, such as how much cooling a chiller generates per unit of energy.
These common measurements will enable our fab managers to benchmark against each other. FABS21 allows TI to also benchmark against the chip industry as a whole, sparking healthy rivalry and revealing opportunities for improvement. The database allows for several filters, too, such as specific type of manufacturing site or climate zone.
"Executives at all of our industry's companies are very competitive," said Westbrook, explaining the human impulse behind the program. "If there is benchmarking going on, then by gosh, they are going to want to know: 'why aren't we the best?'."
The data is anonymous to protect those companies that want to keep specific data from being shared. Still, by providing system-level metrics, FABS21 helps TI identify potential energy- and water-consumption opportunities.
That's key because our manufacturing facilities represent 88 percent of the company's global energy bill. Although our energy-efficiency projects shave $4 million to $5 million from the total cost every year, there's always room for improvement.
"Resource efficiency is not just an environmental initiative," said James Beasley, environmental safety and health manager for ISMI. "It's also an important business process that can reduce costs for fabs."
A larger energy-efficiency push
FABS21 is just one part of TI's overall emphasis on energy efficiency. In 2009, an energy team, including TI's first worldwide energy strategy manager, was established to provide a more focused effort globally. In addition, TI continues to invest several million dollars each year into hundreds of projects worldwide to conserve resources. The best resource-saving ideas are incorporated into a best practices checklist and shared with all sites. For 2010, the list has been further improved and is now called the best practice standards.
In a German fab, for instance, we invested $200,000 to reuse heat generated from manufacturing. Waste heat from a cooling water loop used to cool manufacturing equipment was routed to a coil in the fresh air supply so that the heat could be used to warm the incoming air. The project paid for itself in a year.
Facilities teams are also continuing to install variable-speed drives on fans to better match their speed to the need. Running a fan at half speed uses only an eighth of the energy.
"Teams from around the world submit efficiency projects to our team," Westbrook explained. "We rank them and implement the best ones."
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