Water sustainability in US semiconductor manufacturing: treatment technologies, implementation barriers and a multi-criteria water technology selection framework for fabs

A leading-edge chip plant uses several million gallons of ultrapure water a day, as much as a mid-sized city. The CHIPS Act is putting new plants in Arizona and other places that are already short of water. When Taiwan’s 2021 drought cut municipal allocations, fabs cut production. A single day’s shutdown can cost $10 to 20 million. There are plenty of treatment and reuse technologies, from ordinary reverse osmosis to membrane distillation and zero-liquid-discharge trains. What is missing is a structured way for a plant to choose among them on more than cost.

This paper reviews the technologies against semiconductor water-quality targets and then builds a decision framework. It scores each option three ways at once: multi-criteria decision analysis for performance, cost, practicality and strategy, ISO life-cycle assessment for carbon, water and energy, and a technology readiness screen for how proven each piece is. Everything is normalised to a 1 to 9 scale so the trade-offs sit in one picture. We ran it on a 5-nanometre logic fab in Arizona drawing 4.5 million gallons a day, comparing five configurations. A distributed architecture, separate treatment trains matched to each process stream, came out on top: 75 percent water recovery at mid-range energy and cost with proven components. Zero liquid discharge recovered the most water but paid for it in energy and carbon. The emerging-technology mix performed best on paper and lost on maturity.

The main contribution is the tool. It is open access, the datasets and scorecards are released with it, and a plant engineer, a state regulator or a company sustainability team can put in their own weights and see what changes. Water decisions in heavy industry have mostly been made on cost and reliability alone. The framework adds environmental impact and implementation risk to the same comparison.