Abstract to follow.

Sustainability must be embedded across the entire semiconductor value chain from the very first decision. This joint presentation highlights two examples of how Infineon is turning this ambition into reality.

The first part explores the Smart Power Fab in Dresden, designed to “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” (LEED) standards and supporting Infineon’s Climate ambition through resource-efficient manufacturing and optimized use of energy and water. The second part showcases a 9R circular economy-guided wearable sensing platform for chronic wound monitoring. By combining circular design principles, Life Cycle Assessment, multimodal electrochemical sensing, and highly integrated semiconductor technology, the platform demonstrates the potential to reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 70% compared to standard care.
Together, these examples illustrate how semiconductor innovation can create environmental and societal value, from sustainable manufacturing to next-generation healthcare solutions.

The Smart Power Fab is funded by the European Union, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Saxony. Sponsors: European Union NextGenerationEU, Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy based on a resolution of the German Bundestag and the Saxon State Ministry for Economic Affairs, Labour, Energy and Climate Protection.
 The smart wound monitoring was carried out as part of SUSTRONICS project that is co-funded by the European Union under grant agreement 101112109 and the BMFTR.

Recent research on Sustainable Business Model Design (Stanford University Press, 2026) and Sustainable Innovation Cultures (De Gruyter, 2026) reveals significant opportunities for semiconductor companies to turn sustainability challenges into drivers of innovation, resilience, and competitive advantage.

Proven sustainable business model design patterns already applied in the industry include Sustainable Product Design, Remanufacturing and Resource Efficiency and Productivity. Precursors to advanced patterns, like Pay-for-Success, Green Razor and Blade or Online Waste Exchange Platform, open opportunities for novel circular combinations. Emerging approaches, including Ecosystem Orchestration, Result-Oriented Services and Regeneration, create new pathways to decouple growth from resource consumption while generating create ecological, social, and economic value.

While sustainable business model innovation may begin with a dedicated strategy, project, or technology, lasting transformation requires a generative innovation culture. Sustainable Innovation Cultures draw on proven practices and methods to embed sustainability values into everyday decisions and collaboration structures, enabling measurable impact and continuous adaptation. Drawing on lessons from leading companies across industries, this session explores practical pathways for advancing sustainable business models and innovation cultures across the semiconductor sector.

Plansee is a leading manufacturer of molybdenum and tungsten products, supplying essential materials for various semiconductor manufacturing processes – including EUV lithography, ion implantation, and components such as sputtering targets or ion beam grids used in thin film deposition and etching.

This talk will highlight concrete examples of how we are implementing our sustainability goals across operations. These include scaling up green hydrogen production or collaborating with customers on refurbishment initiatives to increase the share of reused products. In addition, product innovation and people development are discussed.

A strategic backbone of the Plansee Group is its extensive backward integration in raw material supply. Built on two pillars – secured access to raw materials and in-house processing and recycling capabilities – this integration ensures independence from supply constraints and enhances the sustainability of our value chain.

This work presents an integrated DeNOx approach to enable low‑emission polysilicon etching operations. A key challenge in silicon etching arises from batch‑wise immersion and removal of silicon from the etching solution, which induce highly dynamic process conditions and sharp NOx concentration gradients in the exhaust gas. These transients place significant demands on downstream abatement systems. To address this, advanced real-time NOx measurements were implemented upstream of the DeNOx catalyst, enabling fast response times and high‑resolution monitoring of rapidly changing emission profiles. Catalyst operation was further optimized through improved gas mixing, ensuring uniform flow distribution and full utilization of the active catalyst surface. In parallel, an enhanced control concept, including Advanced Process Control (APC), was deployed to proactively manage load changes and stabilize catalyst performance under dynamic conditions. The combined measures resulted in a substantial and sustained reduction of NOx emissions while increasing etching productivity, demonstrating a scalable pathway toward environmentally optimized polysilicon manufacturing.

Semiconductor manufacturing faces increasing pressure to improve yield, reduce scrap, and lower its environmental footprint—while managing growing process complexity and data volumes. VisionIQ addresses this challenge by introducing a scalable, AI‑driven vision framework that transforms image‑based inspection data into actionable production insights.

The approach moves beyond isolated, rule‑based vision solutions toward a unified architecture for AI image classification across multiple process steps and equipment types. By detecting subtle defect patterns earlier and more consistently, VisionIQ enables faster root‑cause analysis, targeted process adjustments, and a measurable reduction of scrap and rework.

This talk presents the VisionIQ concept from a manufacturing perspective: how standardized data ingestion, model governance, and production‑ready deployment allow AI vision to scale sustainably in high‑volume semiconductor environments. Real‑world learnings from frontend manufacturing illustrate how VisionIQ contributes not only to yield improvement and cost savings, but also to resource efficiency and long‑term sustainability in semiconductor production.

Integrated sustainability embeds environmental and social criteria into every step of the value chain—from technology and product conception, through manufacturing and use, to reuse and recycling—while systematically tracking economic impact. By designing products for energy efficiency, durability, repairability, and recyclability, companies reduce material and energy consumption, limit waste, and diminish regulatory and reputational risks. In manufacturing, resource optimization, process efficiency, and responsible sourcing translate directly into lower operating costs and more resilient supply chains. At end of life, strategies such as remanufacturing, component harvesting, and closed-loop recycling recover material and functional value that would otherwise be lost. When these actions are coordinated within a circular business model, the cumulative effect is clear: over the full lifecycle, sustainable design and operations generate more gains than losses and more income than spending—through cost savings, new revenue streams, risk reduction, and enhanced brand and market positioning.

When automakers lost billions to the global chip shortage, the warning signs were sitting inside the supply chain the whole time, just invisible past tier two. Carbon works the same way. Over 90 percent of a semiconductor company's emissions hide in suppliers nobody audits, and the same blind spots hiding carbon also hide cost, risk, and revenue.

This talk moves the conversation from carbon reporting to carbon reduction. I will show how agentic AI gives companies visibility past tier two for the first time, turning a static ESG report into a live decision system - the same kind of system that could have flagged helium and neon shortages before they hit production lines. When you can see the chain, cutting carbon and cutting cost stop being separate problems.

You will leave with three moves you can make this quarter, requiring no new headcount, to turn sustainability from a cost center into a source of resilience and margin.

The increasing use of green electricity is a key lever for reducing the carbon footprint of semiconductor manufacturing, but it does not eliminate all relevant environmental impacts. This paper analyzes the effect of green electricity on the corporate footprint of Bosch and illustrates the impact at product level using a MEMS device as an example. A comparison of scenarios with and without green electricity highlights the significant reduction potential, while also revealing remaining contributors such as process gases, abatement efficiency, and consumables.

Going beyond climate change mitigation, the paper extends the perspective to biodiversity impacts, focusing on material origin and supply chains for critical raw materials such as gold and platinum group metals. The analysis shows that further progress requires increased use of recycled precious metals, improved abatement technologies, and the development of alternative process gases. These measures are essential to achieve a more comprehensive sustainability transformation of semiconductor manufacturing.

Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the most energy- and resource-intensive industries in the world. The sustainability conversation tends to focus on fabs and materials — but for chips with long field lifetimes and high unit volumes, the vast majority of the carbon footprint is generated not in manufacturing, but in operation. Design decisions made years before production start lock in this operational footprint, often unnoticed and rarely reversible afterward.
This talk examines which design levers actually matter: microarchitecture and power domains, process-node selection in the trade-off between embodied and operational emissions, voltage/frequency scaling, and firmware-level avoidance of unnecessary activity. Drawing on real design decisions, the talk shows where in the development process a chip's carbon footprint is actually determined — offering a practical compass for future architecture and technology choices.

Sustainability claims in semiconductors increasingly fail not on intent, but on whether a footprint can be reproduced, compared, and defended under audit. Using EcoInsights workflows, we will show how to generate ISO 14067-aligned PCFs, along with an audit pack that includes assumption registers, sensitivity tests, and traceability artifacts suitable for customer procurement and third-party review.

A deep-dive case study will connect assurance discipline to architectural design decisions in advanced packaging: comparing two die-stack options where a seemingly small choice, such as selecting a 2GB versus 3GB DRAM die, materially shifts the packaged device PCF through die area, yield, and packaging contributions. We will show how boundary and allocation choices can exaggerate or mask that design impact, and how standardization and assurance controls restore decision-grade comparability, enabling engineering and procurement teams to make defensible “twin transformation” trade-offs.