Building energy saving performance indices for cleaner semiconductor manufacturing and an empirical study

Abstract

In recent years, global climate change has caused worldwide severe disasters. Countries started to convene CO2 reduction meetings, but they failed to achieve expected outcome. With global greenhouse effect getting worse, governments have more actively made energy saving policies. In 2010, Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan adapted many energy saving strategies, which pushed semiconductor enterprises to take it seriously.Semiconductor industry is both technology and energy intense; therefore, using effective ways to reach energy saving goal has become an important issue. This study aims to establish a Fab energy efficiency assessment model for the semiconductor industry based on SMART decision analysis structure, which used multiple energy saving methods to measure energy cost management efficiency, and considered both theoretical and practical conditions to give suggestions to each indicator to improve the decision making on energy expenditure and distribution. In addition, this study took a Fab in Taiwan as an example to demonstrate the inspection of energy efficiency and construct OPE (Overall Power Energy Effectiveness) indicators, which can help managers to understand the execution of each decision-making unit and properly deploy the resource. The results showed that a Fab must additionally evaluate the energy saving design in expansion and concretely explain energy saving effect and energy management, analyzed the encountered energy difficulties and solutions in 8-inch Fab system, provided a reference for future expansion. The results demonstrated the practical viability of this approach.