Environmental impact of indirect materials in semiconductors industry.

NXP Package innovation at a glance:

NXP Semiconductors N.V. is a Dutch semiconductor manufacturing and design company that enables secure connections for a smarter world advancing solutions that make lives easier better and safer. As the world leader in secure connectivity solutions for embedded applications NXP is driving innovation in the automotive industrial & IoT mobile and communication infrastructure markets.

Built on more than 60 years of combined experience and expertise the company has over 30000 employees in more than 30 countries and posted revenue of $9.41 billion in 2018.

Package Innovation within NXP CTO is a multi-national organization responsible for product technology and process development for all of NXPs semiconductor product development we design packages and simulate their electrical mechanical and thermal characteristics to ensure they will meet their desired use case technology development we are in the forefront of NXPs and often times the industrys most advanced packagesreducing to practice new ideas and new materials and bringing them to market to serve our customers process development we work in partnership with our internal assembly factories to develop the process concepts and recipes the equipment and tooling and the underlying materials and handling that enable high quality and high yield for manufacturing.

All this is accomplished with a fundamental commitment to the highest quality; deep understanding of our businesses markets products and customers; deep technical understanding of the physical systems and materials we employ; and a commitment to a smooth hand-off to our manufacturing partners both internal and external. Its all enabled by top-notch committed people spanning the globe and co-located with our businesses and factories.

Project overview:

As part of the drive towards improving the sustainability of our products it is important to be aware of the impact of the overall set of indirect materials (packing) involved in the semiconductors industry.

Fig 1: Packing (on the left) vs NXP chip packages (on the right).

At the moment within Package Innovation (R&D) the main focus to get an improved sustainability is on direct materials by looking at biobased and/or recyclable alternatives for standard plastics. Not much attention is put on the packing materials used for internal and external shipments.

Since NXP is a global company it is often (on a daily basis) needed to ship samples for several purposes to other addition to this because of the continuous commitment towards innovation and new material investigation and development shipments and collaborations with the suppliers are happening on a daily basis.

Since it is high performance materials we are dealing with the packing should meet specific requirements to ensure defined temperatures no contamination and enough mechanical resistance not to damage the samples.

For this reason it frequently happens that the materials are wrapped in too much material which is way more than could be needed to serve its purpose.

For this reason it would be interesting to see the actual impact of all these packing materials on the overall company sustainability impact and to assess potential alternatives to replace the most impactful materials used for packing (e.g. bubble wrap).

The activities are going to be focused on one product/business line only from raw materials supply to the final products shipment to the customer. This would allow to have a more in depth analysis and comprehensive assessment within the given time for the internship.

Activities involved in this project:

• Benchmarking on the current trend in semiconductor industry and how NXP is doing compared to other major competitors.
• Analysis on the packing used by NXP:
  • Is this needed can it be downsized
  • What are the materials used Could they be replaced by something more sustainable

• LCA assessment on packing materials
  • Impact of packing materials on the whole supply chain most critical segments analysis in the supply chain.
  • Regulations & standards. This refers to the fact that sometimes the packing cannot be replaced by something more sustainable because of specific shipping fact in some cases there are limitations on the type of packing to be used because it has to meet specific standards related to the storage of the material (i.e. moisture content temperature light exposure...). Therefore before to suggest for an alternative it is needed to check if this is compliant with the requirements.
• LCA assessment on alternative materials (re-use/recyclable packing materials)
• Final report

Location of work: hybrid three days in presence (Gerstweg 2 6534AE Nijmegen Nijmegen Goffert train station) with the possibility of working from home two days per week.

Duration of the project: January to June 2026

More information about NXP in the Netherlands...