The quantity required may be enormous. In the US, chip fabs use far much less water than the agriculture and energy era industries, and semiconductors haven’t spurred political tensions over water sources at nationwide scale, says Chris Miller, a historical past professor at Tufts University in Massachusetts and creator of the current ebook Chip War. Still, squeezes have been a priority in TSMC’s dwelling of Taiwan, the place droughts have pitted native farmers, who noticed their irrigation methods shut off, towards the chip maker.

Not simply any water will do. Just because the air inside a chip fab should be so free from mud that folks should put on all-enveloping coveralls, the semiconductor trade makes use of a particular class of “ultrapure” water to wash silicon wafers all through the manufacturing course of. While customary consuming water may need a purity of 100 to 800 microsiemens per centimeter—a measure {of electrical} conductivity used as one indicator of contamination—ultrapure water has lower than .055 microsiemens per centimeter, in accordance with Gradiant, a water recycling startup based mostly in Boston that works with chip makers. Ultrapure water must have an especially low conductivity, which correlates to solely a small variety of troublesome ions, or charged atoms.

“If you want to have the highest possible performance of the material, very often you have to go to extreme purity,” says Cornell electrical and pc engineering professor Grace Xing, who additionally directs a brand new cross-university semiconductor analysis middle referred to as SUPREME. “That’s one of the reasons the semiconductor industry requires a lot of water.”

Producing ultrapure water is a multistep process that removes a variety of contaminants, including microbes and other microscopic creatures that you might find in oceans and lakes, as well as smaller particles, including even salt ions. One technique used is reverse osmosis, also used in desalination plants, which involves pushing water through a membrane with pores small enough to filter out salts. (Chip fabs also use less-pure water, similar to that which flows from household faucets, for cooling manufacturing equipment.)

Given water’s crucial role in chip manufacturing, recovering and reusing wastewater has become a priority for the industry. The more that can be reused within a fab, the less its need to tap the local water supply. Right now, the proportion of waste water that can be recycled varies between companies and fabs, depending on the manufacturing processes in use and the investment in water treatment. Still, they’re all confronting the same basic problem: As wafers are cleaned, ultrapure water becomes contaminated and requires thorough cleaning before it can be reused by a fab or discharged into a public wastewater treatment system.

Cleaning up the soiled water is a complicated process because myriad contaminants can be found in fab wastewater. Lithography and etching can produce acidic wastewater, and can even contaminate it with powerful hydrofluoric acid. Suspended silicon particles can show up when wafers are thinned down, while the use of solvents including isopropyl alcohol can leave organic carbon residues.

The trade has developed methods to separate out completely different parts of that wastewater, just like how the overall inhabitants type recycling, says Prakash Govindan, cofounder and COO of Gradiant. “The semiconductor industry is actually very advanced when it comes to dealing with wastewater,” he says. “The advanced companies, the American multinationals we work with—but also the Korean and Taiwanese companies we work with—all of them segregate their wastewater into more than 10 kinds, minimum, and some of them into 15 or 16.”