Why “Sustainable” and “Green” are Meaningless Terms to Designers

If you ask most engineers about green or sustainable electronics design, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say, “So what?” If you ask those same engineers about low power design, they’ll lean their shoulders forward and say, “Continue.” And if you ask their managers, the response will be, “You mean system-level design, don’t you?”

These professionals are not being callous in their indifference toward ecological design issues. Rather, they’re responses are testament to the complexity with which they work every day. Chip and board designers realize that they only have time and mental resources to focus on those requirements that directly impact their designs. Ecological constraints do impact their work, but only under the guise of an ever shrinking power budget. For their managers – who must allocate the power and performance budgets in the first place – the ecological impacts are manifest in system level architectural trade-offs.

Part of the problem is that today’s eco-sensitive terms are fairly new, or are being applied in a different context. For example, it used to be fashionable to talk about “green” electronics? Now, the preferred term by many companies and universities is sustainable electronic design. This is not just a study in semantics. Many people use eco, green and sustainability as interchangeable terms that mean roughly the same thing. But do they?

Eco or green design refers to the development of products, buildings or services that are sensitive to environmental issues. The key goal in successful green designs is achieving greater efficiency and effectiveness in terms of energy and usage of materials. For chip and board designers, this translates directly into low power – both hardware and software – which in turn requires a systems designer perspective.

Sustainable electronic design refers to process that spans the entire life cycle of a product. In truth, design is a misnomer, since it suggests just one portion of the complete product life cycle. For this reason, I should replace “design” with “development.” But for the sake of continuity, I’ll stay with the more common vernacular of “design.”

The aim of sustainable design is to balance economic, social, and ecological sustainability. Traditionally, the multidiscipline engineering community has focused on the first and last aspects of this definition, namely economic and ecological effects on product design. In the past, economics has always ruled. Today, the same is true – economics rule, but with this difference. Ecological impacts have gained a more clear economic cost thanks to end-of-life disposal costs, public perceptions, etc., which means that sustainability must now be considered as an additional constraint on the solution option space for product design.

Consider the example of alternative energy technology. Energy creation and storage is perhaps the most important aspect of sustainability for chip and board designers. But renewable and alternative energy systems must meet economic realities. If a design can be accomplished using current generation and storage technology, then there is little reason for a designer to look for alternative solutions – e.g., solar, energy scavengers, etc. Little reason until one considers the entire product life cycle cost. This is where sustainability is changing the equation. More legislative laws are requiring manufacturers to pay for end-of-life disposal. These laws bring the end-of-life costs directly to the forefront of the design cycle. You might call this a Design-for-Sustainability (DFS) methodology.

Regardless of the names, adding the cost of eventual disposal increase the front-end costs of the product, which give may give alternative energy sources a boost if they can provide the required energy and future disposal costs in line with current technologies.

What does this mean to designers? They must add a new set of trade-off analysis at the architectural level of the design process that examines the use of alternative energy and end-of-live disposal costs in the design. For this to occur, engineers must have a great understanding of the impact of these affects.

Are you a designer wrestling with the additional constraints of sustainable and/or green design? Let us know which low power or system-level technical issues give you the most problems and will engage the community to find a solution.