Sustainability and Workforce Topics Dominate Day 2 of SEMICON West 

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Sustainability and the workforce were prolific themes for the second day of SEMICON West on July 10. Sustainability kicked off with keynote speaker Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president and arguably America’s most passionate environmental advocate for nearly 50 years. He once again outlined the serious environmental issues and timelines we are facing and emphasized the importance of the industry’s commitment to sustainability initiatives.

He was followed by Jeff Thomas of Nasdaq, who began by asking, “Did you know that Nasdaq is a technology company?” I did not. Additionally, Nasdaq is a partner of SEMI in the area of sustainability, having co-created a white paper titled “The Rising Tide: Building a Climate-Resilient Semiconductor Value Chain.” He also described Nasdaq’s recently created an Environmental Sustainability Goals (ESG) Advisory Service, where it has leveraged AI to aggregate and organize massive amounts of sustainability data so companies can use it to meaningfully benchmark their ESG progress. He concluded by stating that we all have a role in sustainability and emphasized that semiconductors are poised to do such important work, but innovation must be undertaken responsibly and with an eye toward sustainability.

Next up was a CEO panel discussion featuring Frank Sanders, corporate vice president of Intel, Angela Baker, corporate sustainability officer at Qualcomm, and John Powers, vice president at Schneider Electric, and moderated by SEMI’s Mousumi Bhat. They were asked about collaboration, undertaking risk assessments, and how their companies are addressing the seemingly unquenchable thirst for the power of modern-day devices in their own product development. Frank Sanders spoke about Intel’s RISE program: responsible, inclusive, sustainable, enable. He explained that keeping themselves accountable to their ESG commitments is part of Intel’s culture to the degree that some amount of compensation across the entire company is tied to it. He also stated strongly that they cannot solve these problems alone and have created a consortium of stakeholders that includes government and academia.

“We talk about everything from how we measure to how we create action plans to how we have accountability,” he said. He touched upon the changing regulatory landscape, using a memorable turn of phrase, maintaining “the ongoing right to operate.” Schneider has also recently become a partner to Intel’s Catalyze program, focused on looking at all emissions and environmental impact upstream and downstream of the supply chain to assess total environmental impact and real progress.

Regarding risk assessment, Intel uses a risk registry approach and does scenario planning exercises. When asked if the industry was ready or if we even had the tools to address these huge, global environmental challenges, Angela Baker commented that doing so must be a cross-functional endeavor. She proclaimed the need to bring in other industries entirely, like agriculture, which also has significant carbon footprints being addressed. John Powers of Schneider stated emphatically that we have the technology to relatively easily and inexpensively achieve the first 60+% of zero waste goals, but it will take both government and corporate will to make it happen; these are things he is not convinced we have. Baker agreed, saying that we must achieve some of these things much faster than we are currently on pace to do. Her comment contained the unspoken opinion that it simply will not happen unless and until companies are legally compelled to.

AI is driving a thirst for energy, potentially overwhelming our existing energy grids. Bhat presented a slide showing a 24% per year growth in the need for energy against a backdrop of a 3% growth rate in renewable energy sources. She stated that the two would not intersect until 2040 and said that even if we could create all the renewable energy we would need, our energy grids couldn’t handle it. Qualcomm mentioned its work in “On-Device AI” where some amount of AI and the data needed to use it will be on the device itself, not in the cloud. The others echoed similar sentiments around approaching product development in ways that would relieve the grid.

The dramatic need for data processing and storage capabilities made for a nice segue into a presentation on quantum computing by Subodh Kulkarni of Rigetti, in a presentation titled “Building on Decades of Semiconductor Innovation for Transformative Computing Power.” 

“We're on a mission to build the world’s most powerful computers to help solve humanity’s most important and pressing problems,” he said, which sounded more like a directive than a mission. He echoed a common theme by emphasizing the necessity of collaboration, and heralded Rigetti’s open-source forum for collaboration as opposed to more closed systems used by other companies. He also took us through a brief comparison of high-level computing models and compared Qbit's amazing and powerful ability to stay entangled—no matter how far apart they may be—to photonics technology, which is inherently challenged by the fact that photons do not like to entangle with one another. He touted hybrid computing as a mid-term solution to going full quantum, in which Rigetti is deeply involved. Kulkarni concluded his presentation by providing some price points for those interested. If you are ready to embrace quantum computing, you can be set up with a 9 Qbit system for just under $1 million and a 24 Qbit system for between $5-6 million, emphatically proclaiming, “Quantum computing is happening in the new few years. It is only a question of ‘when,’ not ‘if.’”

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