• Question: How is sustainability integrated into your job as an engineer?

    Asked by tree to Alex, Chris, Mohamed, Rik, Victoria on 6 Mar 2015.
    • Photo: Rik Allen

      Rik Allen answered on 6 Mar 2015:

      Hi,
      I do sometimes worry about this – the industry is always trying to sell the next version of the product, and that means there is waste.

      Because I design silicon chips, one of the main things we have to worry about is how much power it will use. Sometimes this is just so your phone can run youTube for longer, but other times it can make a big difference to how much energy it needs to run. The big companies like Google need a huge amount of electricity for there servers – we are trying to reduce that.

      The type of chip I work on at the moment is also interesting because we can change all it’s wiring after it’s been made – this means that when the next version of the design comes along, we don’t have to throw the old chip away but can just rewire it – like running a new computer program. This should help reduce waste.

      Rik

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