Sustainability

Supporting the development of sustainable vehicles

The transformation toward software-defined vehicles will have a positive impact on the environment. Basemark is here to support OEMs & tier suppliers to speed up the development of a more sustainable automotive industry.

Water usage in chip manufacturing

4.5

Around 4,5 billion litres of water is required to produce all chips needed for all cars produced in a year.

*Around 100 million cars are produced annually

Chip manufacturing

A substantial amount of emission releases outputted from vehicle manufacturing are accounted for by chip manufacturing.

Power & water consumption

A car contains more than 100 chips
It takes 45 litres of water to produce one chip
It takes a lot of electricity to produce chips

Fossil fuel & chemical emissions

Consumption outcome of manufacturing one 32 MB DRAM chip:

1,6 kg of fossil fuels
72 g of chemical inputs

Chip fabs emit a lot of greenhouse gases, ingredients with high Global Warming Potential (GWP) that include fluorinated compounds such as:

perfluorocarbons (e.g., CF4, C2F6, C3F8and c-C4F8)
hydrofluorocarbons (CHF3, CH3F and CH2F2)
nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) and
sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)

”“Chip manufacturing, rather than energy consumption or hardware use, accounts for most of the carbon output from electronics devices”
Udit Gupta et. al. (Harvard 2020)

The path towards sustainability

Basemark supports the development of sustainable vehicles by developing efficient and innovative automotive software solutions.
Basemark’s software solutions enable:

Reduction of the number of chips needed in vehicles

Reduction of vehicle power consumption by making more efficient use of chips

Reduction of vehicles needed by accelerating the path to autonomous vehicles

Reduction of road accidents and fatalities with autonomous drive and ADAS

Reducing the number of chips in vehicles

Basemark helps to reduce at least two chips per car produced, that is 200 million chips per year and savings of:

320 000

150 000

Sources:
https://www.epa.gov/f-gas-partnership-programs/semiconductor-industry
https://news.stanford.edu/pr/96/960605chipsenvir.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-08/the-chip-industry-has-a-problem-with-its-giant-carbon-footprint#xj4y7vzkg
https://pages.jh.edu/aandreo1/495/Archives/Bibliography/Processing/EnergyCosts/EnergyAndMaterialsUseInMicrochips_EST.pdf
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-08/the-chip-industry-has-a-problem-with-its-giant-carbon-footprint