A better model for silicon: quantifying chip carbon with Columbia and Cornell

MicroGreen and ACT were built to enable engineers to quantify the embodied carbon of their hardware. A better model for silicon: quantifying chip carbon with Columbia and Cornell. In a previous post, we described how we calculate the embodied carbon of our products: weighing each component, mapping those weights to the ecoinvent database, and working with our partners to build a full life cycle assessment (LCA).

It’s a solid, tangible approach — but as we looked harder at the results, one part of the picture kept nagging at us: Silicon. Why weight was the wrong lens for chips Mapping a component to an emissions figure by its weight works well for a great many materials. The carbon embodied in a piece of silicon is affected by both weight and how it was made: the process node, the die area, the number of manufacturing steps, the energy intensity of the fab, and the manufacturing yield.

Treating our chips as generic mass, mapped to a broad semiconductor dataset, left us with figures that we increasingly felt overstated the true emissions of the silicon we actually use. We were confident the number was conservative — but conservative isn’t the same as correct. Enter MicroGreen and ACT The answer came from MicroGreen, a tool developed by researchers at Cornell and Columbia, which is based upon ACT, the Architectural Carbon Modeling Tool developed by Harvard and Meta.

MicroGreen and ACT were built to enable engineers to quantify the embodied carbon of hardware and treat it as a first-order design consideration, sitting alongside performance and power.