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Energy Savings in Semiconductor Memory Manufacturing - A State-of-the-art Technology for “Furnace”
September 20, 2024
Climate change due to global warming has a significant impact on ecosystems and our lives, and causes serious global problems. Kioxia Group treats initiatives addressing climate change as one of the management priorities and we refer to these priority areas as “sustainability materiality”. We have set the goal of achieving by FY2050 net-zero Scope1 greenhouse gas emissions (direct emissions from our business sites), and Scope2 emissions (indirect emissions resulting from our use of purchased energy) across our global operations. As part of this, we are actively developing and implementing energy-saving manufacturing equipment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of energy we use in our operations.
Thoroughly Analyze the Power Consumption of Heat Treatment Processes and Identify Opportunities for Improvement
In semiconductor memory manufacturing, the heat treatment of wafers is a core process to ensure quality. In collaboration with semiconductor manufacturing equipment suppliers, Kioxia has applied the latest energy-saving technologies to furnaces*1 that control heating process and introduced them since the late 2010s. In furnaces, the process of loading wafers into the furnace, heating, cooling, and unloading them from the furnace is repeated. We conducted an analysis of power consumption in this series of processes to optimize the heating and cooling curve of the wafers. Additionally, we evaluated and implemented energy-saving technologies, such as the adoption of energy-saving heaters and improved thermal insulator.
These efforts have helped us reduce the power consumption per wafer by half compared to conventional equipment, resulting in an annual energy-saving of over 300 million kWh in FY2023. This reduction is equivalent to the amount of electricity consumed annually by approximately 72,000 households, or half of the households in Yokkaichi City*2, where our Yokkaichi plant is located. Additionally, this has led to a decrease in CO2 emissions by about 120,000 tons per year, helping to prevent global warming.
We will continue to deepen our collaboration with various suppliers to minimize the environmental impact across the value chain. And we aim to take over valuable resources to the future, and contribute to the realization of a sustainable society.
- A furnace is a manufacturing equipment that controls high-temperatures heating processes used in memory manufacturing processes. It consists of a quartz tube and a heater. Gas control technology is used enable high-temperature and uniform heating for processes such as oxidation, deposition, diffusion and crystal growth of wafers.
- Based on our own research (as of August 2024)
