01 What Happened

A Water Magazine interview published on August 19 examines FTD Solutions’ participation in imec’s sustainable-semiconductor research programme. The collaboration focuses on industrial water management, chemical modelling, PFAS reduction, water circularity and net-zero operations. The underlying partnership was announced earlier in 2026; today’s article focuses on how integrated modelling can connect semiconductor manufacturing technology with facility-level water and wastewater systems.

02 Key Takeaways

  • 01 The work links semiconductor process decisions with water, wastewater and chemical-system modelling.
  • 02 PFAS management is being framed as a choice between upstream elimination, downstream treatment or a combination of both.
  • 03 Water circularity is being treated as a system-level accounting and decision problem rather than a single reuse percentage.

03 Why It Matters

The most important idea is the removal of the artificial boundary between process engineering and facility water engineering.

In semiconductor fabs, chemical choices made in lithography, cleaning and rinsing directly shape wastewater chemistry, PFAS loading, reclaim potential and downstream treatment demand. Modelling these systems separately can hide trade-offs that only become visible when process and utility data are connected.

04 ATLAS Engineering View

PFAS is a good example. The lowest-TCO solution may be upstream substitution, downstream capture, or a hybrid strategy. Likewise, water circularity should not be reduced to a reuse percentage: UPW demand, reject recovery, segregated waste streams, RO/AIX loading, energy and treatment residuals all matter. The value of digital modelling is therefore not simply better dashboards, but earlier decisions about where to eliminate contaminants, where to recover water and where treatment becomes uneconomic.

05 Sources