Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has received Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certifications for its green buidlings. Digitimes recently sat down with Arthur Chuang, director of TSMC's New Fab Planning and Engineering Division, to understand the firm's green building project.
Q: When did TSMC decide to start constructing green ?
A: We saw a report talking about how Texas Instruments (TI) invented a cost-effective and environmental way to build a 12-inch wafer fab in order to obtain subsidies provided by the local government.
We wanted to know the cost-effective way to build a 12-inch wafer fab, so we looked for answers and discovered the standards for green building coincided with TSMC's values to protect the environment. So internally, we set up a green building project in 2005.
In fact, green building standards are like a comprehensive health check-up, with the emphasis on having an energy-saving environmental system or even becoming a green-energy organic entity. The standards coincide perfectly with TSMC's effort in raising awareness of protecting the environment. Therefore, the project was immediately welcomed by the management team.
Q: How did TSMC achieve the project target?
A: There are a total of 26 green building rating systems in the world, and after careful consideration, TSMC decided to follow the US-based LEED and Taiwan-based Ecology, Energy-saving, Waste-reduction and Health (EWWH) standards.
At first, the New Fab and Engineering Division started a book club and translated the LEED standards from English into Chinese, and tried to discover the original spirit behind the standards and inspirations for constructing green buildings. The book club spent almost 14,000 hours gaining complete understanding of LEED's green building standards.
Then, to construct a green building, we needed to follow the standards in several aspects such as the cost structure, time restraint, energy-saving features and production efficiency. Also, we needed to find the golden balance within the limits of the plant project budget.
In addition, we formed a cross-department platform to gather all resources to make sure our fabs - existing ones, those still under construction and future ones - would meet the standards.
With all the effort, TSMC was able to obtain the LEED and Taiwan's certifications for its 12-inch wafer fabs.
Q: What is the actual benefit for TSMC for completing the green building project?
A: Firstly, the completion of the project allows TSMC to achieve the goal of sustainable development and fulfill the promise of becoming a world-class environmental corporation. Secondly, through constant learning of green building standards, everyone in the firm has become more aware of the environmental concept. Thirdly, the project has prompted TSMC to develop better simulation methods with which we have found new ways to build green fabs.
