Reducing the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions to at least 50% of their 1990 levels will require a monumental effort by industrial organisations across the continent. Such collaboration requires a community, and Inside (formerly known as ARTEMIS) is here to provide the openness and innovation necessary to meet the European Green Deal’s goals.
More than a buzzword
“The European Green Deal means that we should continue to work on solutions that reduce CO2 emissions, energy consumption and the need for higher and higher processing efficiency,” explains Patrick Pype. As a community, we’ve been working on this for many years and we are very strong in this. I often say that we’ve lost the battle for the cloud in Europe but we are winning the battle for edge computing and low power compute efficiency. That’s an important aspect because it’s not just a matter of high data processing but rather efficient data processing. This means that we need to build intelligence in our chips and software to see what data to use and how to use it with the lowest power consumption. That’s where we should continue our strengths.”
As NXP’s Director Strategic Partnerships and a permanent guest of the Inside Presidium, Patrick has one foot in the technical side of sustainability and the other in the long-term governance needed to make a real success of this. A particular area of interest for him is the lifetime analysis of components and systems. “Whereas we now often wait until a system breaks down to take action, we should have Intelligent Digital Systems that predict when they will break down or that can still work at 90% of their capacity. Another area is the recycling of materials – a complete printed circuit board is now often thrown away and recycled in one way or another. But how about replacing only part of it or more intelligently composing the system if some parts live longer than others?”
Grabbing the headlines
These are the sorts of the questions which NXP and other Inside members are now asking themselves, helping to reframe the European Green Deal as a competitive opportunity and not just an antidote to prior mistakes. “If you look to manufacturing, we all follow sustainability guidelines while aiming to improve our fab production further and further. We also have shared ambitions with other players in Europe,” Patrick points out. “If I look at automotive, for example, we are moving together to the electrification of cars and intelligently charging the batteries of electric cars. Automated cars will also mean less traffic jams – read less CO2 emissions – and less accidents. This all helps to contribute to the Green Deal and sustainability.”
As for Inside, Patrick considers the name change and renewed sense of purpose as a golden opportunity to definitively put the Green Deal on the agenda of companies and domains which previously saw little involvement. “We should more actively promote what we are able to do,” he concludes. “We’ve already evolved a lot and made a lot of progress in this domain but we did not promote it well enough in my opinion. A role of Inside can therefore be to really show some concrete results of what we’ve realised in terms of contributions to sustainability and the Green Deal.”
