Energy Saving at Yokkaichi Operations, Japan

At Yokkaichi Operations in Japan, Toshiba's principal manufacturing base for NAND flash memory for portable music players, digital cameras, etc., efforts to increase capacity are being made in response to soaring demand.

Energy saving is one of the major issues for semiconductor plants since clean rooms, which must be air conditioned around the clock, consume a huge amount of energy. However, the numerous measures implemented in the latest clean room at Yokkaichi Operations reduce energy consumption by 50%. Local air conditioning (see the figure above) has proved to be highly effective: by maintaining the level of cleanliness of the areas for processing of products while reducing the level of cleanliness of other areas, electricity consumption for air conditioning has been greatly reduced.

Other measures include the introduction of sophisticated equipment to minimize power loss of transformers, adoption of invertercontrolled power equipment, and recycling of the waste heat from the cooling tower for air conditioning. We have embarked on a concerted effort to make Yokkaichi Operations an environmentally conscious factory dedicated to the manufacture of cutting-edge products.