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Driving the Future of Semiconductors

Interview with Nicolas Blasco

Questions

Essential to daily life ? Your contribution? Key challenges ?

Semiconductor devices are hidden components that are present everywhere in our daily life. A semiconductor chip is made of silicon, which is the most abundant material on Earth and is typically the size of less than one square centimeter and one millimeter thick. Semiconductor devices can be electrically conductive or electrically insulating, depending on the way they are used. And this is fundamental because it allows to access the famous zero and one that are the basis of modern computing. Zero when the material is insulating, one when the material is conductive.

Semiconductor devices are used everywhere in our daily life, for things as diverse as communicating, working, traveling, but they are also used for fundamental science discoveries, for instance in environmental science, in medicine or physics.

Air Liquide doesn't produce semiconductor devices. However our gases are used at every step of semiconductor manufacturing. We produce gases like argon, helium, nitrogen or oxygen at the highest purity possible to meet the requirements of the industry. In addition, we also invent and develop new gases and new molecules to answer very specific needs of our customers with whom we co-develop processes and materials.

Today, every device in the world has been manufactured using an Air Liquide molecule. Air Liquide also contributes to the industry sustainability. For instance, we constantly optimize and reduce the electrical consumption of our gas production plants and use renewable energy whenever possible. In addition, we develop new materials with a lower environmental footprint. For instance, we released a new class of etch gases, our EnScribeTM offer, with lower global warming potential than their traditional counterparts.

The industry will have to face several challenges. The first one relates to energy transition. The chips will have to consume much less energy to face the exponential increase of demand pulled by artificial intelligence. The second challenge will be to secure the supply chain with more and more localization of production plants pulled by public incentives. The third challenge will be technological itself. The chips will have to become even smaller to face the tremendous increase of demand, especially in the memory space that we are expecting to see in the next few years.

Air Liquide helps facing those challenges by constantly innovating in terms of new materials, in terms of reducing the electrical consumption of our gas production plants, and anticipating our customers’ needs.

Achieving carbone neutrality by 2050

Interview with Guillaume de Smedt

Senior Expert, Technology Integration, Electronics activity of Air Liquide

Questions

Your climate strategy: Your role in a low carbone society? What’s next?

We have a very clear climate ambition and a clear commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Our climate strategy relies on two pillars. One, reduce our own emissions. And second, to support our customers to help them reach their own neutrality.

To reduce our emissions, we rely on sourcing massive amounts of renewable and low-carbon power, modernizing our industrial assets, and installing carbon capture on our hydrogen plants. Carbon capture technologies that can also be used to reduce the emissions of our customers. For instance, in the cement sector.

Our products are used in everyday life and tomorrow in a low-carbon economy, It will be virtually the same with low-carbon gases. Indeed, in order to decarbonize our economy, we will need low-carbon gases to produce batteries for electrical cars. We will need gases to produce low-carbon steel. We will need CO2 capture solutions to produce low-carbon cement, just to name a few applications of our gases. In the meantime, our role and our duty is to work along with our customers in order to support them in their journey to neutrality.

The journey to neutrality has started and well started, with most of the large industrial companies

committed and policy framework being developed around the world to accompany the transition to neutrality. Still, the journey is complex. The journey is long. We know it and now that we have the plan, we know exactly what we have to do. We need to implement concretely, which means investing in new technologies, investing in infrastructures, both for hydrogen or CO2.

And this takes time. This comes with complexity. We need to align with the finance sector, the policymakers and the industrial companies on these objectives, and on the way to achieve it. We know the journey is difficult. We know it would be long, but we know the direction and it's very clear and we are moving forward.