Estimating the carbon footprint expended during physical experimentation presents a larger challenge. These calculations are specific to wafer fabrication equipment, and the calculation methodology is still evolving. Fortunately, new tools and resources have recently become available to make these calculations due to increased attention by manufacturers and with the assistance of various academic partnerships, such as the imec.netzero application [1]. To establish emissions savings enabled by simulation, our technical experts also provided estimates of physical experiments that could be replaced by simulation for each analyzed project. While these estimates are hypothetical, we possess high confidence in the data we received due to our collective experience performing hundreds of similar experiments at Lam Research. The reported data are within the average resource range typically devoted to comparable activities when simulation is not used. This fact gives us further confidence that our comparison between the actual carbon footprint of presented projects and their hypothetical “no-simulation” counterpart is meaningful.
Carbon footprint can be simulated to get the calculations and replace the physical experiments with simulation.