Given the ubiquity of electronic devices and the urgent need to decrease our footprint in the context of global warming and planetary boundaries, it becomes critical to better quantify the environmental impacts of integrated circuit (IC) production. Our work addresses this question in three successive steps. First, we carry out a review of the data available since 2010 from four different literature categories, i.e., foundry reports, industry roadmaps, scientific literature, and life-cycle assessment databases. Then, we leverage the 27 identified sources to perform both a qualitative and quantitative analysis. We propose 10 features for characterizing the scope of studies while focusing on environmental indicators normalized per cm, i.e., energy consumption, carbon footprint and water consumption. The analysis results highlight a clear increasing trend of the environmental footprint with CMOS technology downscaling below 0.13 μm, despite a significant variation between the sources mainly due to scope mismatch. Finally, we show that environmental impacts per cm did not significantly decrease compared to historical values from 1980–2010, whereas the total silicon area produced keeps on increasing by 3.6%/year. Consequently, this work calls for urgently rethinking the road ahead with sobriety to effectively decrease the absolute environmental footprint of the IC production sub-sector.

Mobile health (mHealth) innovations are considered by governments as game changers toward more sustainable health systems. The existing literature focuses on the clinical aspects of mHealth but lacks an integrated framework on its sustainability. The foundational idea for this paper is to include disciplinary complementarities into a multi-dimensional vision to evaluate the non-clinical aspects of mHealth innovations. We performed a targeted literature review to find how the sustainability of mHealth innovations was appraised in each discipline. We found that each discipline considers a different outcome of interest and adopts different time horizons and perspectives for the evaluation. This article reflects on how the sustainability of mHealth innovation can be assessed at both the level of the device itself as well as the level of the health system. We identify some of the challenges ahead of researchers working on mobile health innovations in contributing to shaping a more sustainable health system.

Wireless power transfer (WPT) is a possible alternative to batteries for supplying smart sensors. It is often described as “greener" because it avoids the use of batteries. However, this claim usually lacks the proper assessment of the environmental impacts of WPT and is particularly questionable given the poor efficiency of wirelessly transmitting power over a few meters of distance. In this paper, we design and thoroughly optimize a complete state-of-the-art WPT system and compare it to an equivalent battery-powered solution to assess whether it effectively represents an eco-friendly alternative. The proposed WPT system is a 2.45-GHz simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) system with beamforming and a high peak-to-average power ratio waveform for supplying a battery-less passive infrared sensor for room occupancy tracking. The final prototype of the smart sensor consumes 4and can operate in steady state at 5from the remote power head with an overall power transfer efficiency of 17/and can cold-start at 3.5. We carry out a life-cycle assessment (LCA) of the environmental impacts through four indicators, i.e., primary energy demand, global warming potential, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and freshwater consumption. Results show that for a 10-year lifetime, the WPT alternative has at least 5.5 to 10.3× higher environmental impacts than its battery-powered equivalent. This demonstrates the importance of LCA during the design of IoT smart sensors and shows that the use of meter-range 2.45¯/GHz SWIPT should be limited to applications where conventional battery-powered systems cannot be used.

Information and communication technologies are often considered by policymakers, industrial stakeholders and scientists as a key lever in the run towards sustainability, since they should ease energy efficiency and dematerialization. In this opinion article, nurtured by the inputs of a broad panel of experts, we challenge this widely spread view by highlighting the detrimental social and environmental footprints caused by digital technologies. We further take a critical look on the ways innovation is conducted nowadays, i.e., with an almost exclusive focus on performance and few considerations for externalities. This leads us to call for academic teaching programs advocating for a holistic approach, for new business models, and for ambitious political decisions able to drive a paradigm shift in the mainstream agenda of electronics innovation and digital transition that shall significantly contribute to the well-being of everyone, everywhere, without compromising future generations. We conclude that digital technologies cannot support long-term sustainability if their only purpose remains the optimization of the current system.