- Home›
- Technology and Research›
- Intel Technology Journal›
- Preface
Technology with the Environment in Mind
PREFACE Q1'08
By Lin Chao
Publisher and Editor, Intel Technology Journal
Intel Corporation's four-decade history of technology innovations is a well-known fact. Less known but equally important is that for decades Intel has had goals to reduce the environmental impact of its manufacturing, operations, and products. This issue of the Intel Technology Journal on Eco-Smart Technologies (Volume 12, Issue 1, 2008) features a podcast by Ted Reichelt, Intel's Principal Environmental Engineer, as he remembers operational meetings with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove held nearly two decades ago on this very subject. Today, Intel's commitment to design for environment remains strong: our goal is to reduce the environmental impact of our operations while continuing to meet high-performance requirements for computing. We are designing for energy-efficient performance with platforms that can support usages and applications with dramatically decreased energy consumption, in some cases. We have lead-free and halogen-free materials and packages. We have been reducing our emissions of perfluorocompounds (PFCs) for some time now. We are improving the energy efficiency of our factories and operations. All in all, within the company itself, and with outside partners, we are making environmental sustainability a priority, thereby minimizing the negative effects of our operations and products on the ecosystem.
The seven papers in this issue of the Intel Technology Journal delve into the challenges and their solutions in our factories, operations, and products. The first two papers look at green micro-electronic packaging and a more energy-efficient universal serial bus. The first paper, Materials Technology for Environmentally Green Micro-electronic Packaging, looks at how Intel is working to make substrate materials for micro-electronic packages lead-free and halogen-free. This paper discusses the challenges overcome by Intel to deliver on both aspects of this green packaging technology.
The second paper, Making USB a More Energy-Efficient Interconnect, looks at the power consumption of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) and its impact on mobile platforms. The USB's consumption of power is due to its architecture; devices are constantly polled. Although this creates a simple and low-cost device model, it is fundamentally inefficient—especially when the device is idle or has little data to transfer. We offer techniques that transform USB into a much more energy-efficient interconnect, primarily by optimizing the idle behavior of USB host controllers and devices.
The next two papers explore the technology behind Intel's first built green building, and look at how green consumerism affects the purchasing decisions and technology usage of environmentally conscious people. The third paper, Intel's First Designed and Built Green Building, reviews specifically how a building project in Haifa, Israel was initiated to address the need for a "smart" building; and reveals how the project turned out to be a driver for triggering broader innovations in both the corporation and a largely inexperienced (in the sense of green) local building industry.
The fourth paper, Green Homeowners as Lead Adopters: Sustainable Living and Green Computing, reviews how green consumerism affects the purchasing decisions and technology usage of people who prioritize environmental values in their lives and homes. We draw on our ethnographic study of 35 green households in the United States and look at the role technology plays in the lives of these people. How do their definitions of green consumerism affect their purchasing decisions and their relationship to technology in general? We answer these questions and conclude with a framework of strategies for green computing at the intersection of technology and sustainable living.
The last three papers review greener manufacturing and operations. The fifth paper, Novel Wastewater Reclamation Technology Meets Environmental and Business Challenges, describes how semiconductor wastewater was treated to achieve a high level of wastewater effluent quality meeting the water reuse and conservation priorities of the local authorities. The sixth paper, Dynamic Data Center Power Management: Trends, Issues, and Solutions, reviews Intel environmental, health, and safety early screening and materials management programs that ensure supply-chain stability through the early identification and management of the environment-, health-, and safety-associated risks. Future semiconductor devices are critically dependent on the ability of stable and reliable materials to support new generations of semiconductor devices. In this paper, we provide an overview of what drives Intel's procedures, how the procedures are used, and we review a case study example.
In the final paper, Evaluation Process for Semiconductor Fabrication Materials that are Better for the Environment, we examine the challenges of increasing data center power consumption and higher energy costs in the face of ever-increasing computing needs. We identify requirements that server platforms must address to solve data center power problems. We offer a solution that includes a platform resident Policy Manager that monitors power and thermal sensors and enforces platform power and thermal policies.