How Green Is Green?
Green is good. Everyone says so. Large end-user companies increasingly are looking for green bills of materials and consumers are demanding green products.
But what exactly is green? While the entire semiconductor design chain is focused on reducing power, the real difference between green and non-green is more than just power consumption. If it takes more energy to generate a solar cell than it ultimately saves in electricity, then that isn’t exactly green. And if a distributed smart grid allows consumers to use more energy than they would if they had to pay for every kilowatt/hour from the power company, it’s questionable just how green that approach is, too.
Carbon footprints are even more confusing. While ecologists expound on the advantages of being carbon neutral, the reality is that basic survival puts people into the plus rather than the negative camp. Unless you live on the equator, fish for a living (with homemade hooks made from bone you carved out of wild boar that you killed with a rock) and make your clothes from plant fibers, you’re probably well into the carbon-positive world.
The reality of green is that it’s a step in the right direction. Carbon footprints will never really be neutral or negative, and nothing will ever been completely green. But cutting power, improving time between battery charges, decreasing energy costs—particularly in large, energy-intensive sectors such as enterprise data centers—are all important. Aside from the environmental impact, which is significant even though it’s the subject of fierce debate, there is the unequivocal convenience factor of fewer battery charges, longer battery life, and less money spent on powering devices of all sizes.
As a marketing term, green is very subjective. And for the semiconductor industry, it may be a moving target defined by the companies that can offer the most functions and features at the lowest power the same way, a decade ago, the benchmarks veered into a war over performance. What remains to be seen is whether consumers will really be willing to trade in performance for being even more green, or whether there will be a balance struck between being green and getting the job done at the same or greater speeds. And perhaps even more important, just how much extra they’re willing to spend to have a brighter shade of green.
