Environment

At picoChip we take our environmental responsibilities very seriously: we seek to continually reduce the environmental impact of our own operations, and to forge enduring partnerships with like-minded suppliers who share our values and approach.

Because we are involved in the manufacture of high technology products and have a geographically distributed supply chain, our biggest potential environmental impacts relate to carbon emissions and the use of hazardous substances.

As part of the global semiconductor industry, we aim to reduce our carbon footprint by minimizing the amount of travel undertaken by our people. We also try to eliminate unnecessary movement of products and components. Wherever possible we locate steps in our manufacturing process physically close to each other so that our products do not cross the globe multiple times before they reach our customers.

In addition, we have selected vendors who distribute status, yield, and other tracking information on web-based systems which we can access remotely. This reduces the need for picoChip staff to travel. We also use other types of remote access working to reduce the need for people to travel; for example our engineers can access our automated test equipment remotely over the web for test program development.

In the area of hazardous substances, we adhere to all current guidelines and restrictions in the production of both our chips and boards. We also assess external suppliers with respect to their adherence to these guidelines using regular audits. Just as importantly, it is our policy to take corrective action should deficiencies come to light, and to follow up so as to ensure that processes are rectified.

picoChip also monitors the impact of compliance with these guidelines on the manufacturability and reliability of our products. With our vendors we investigate, trial and adopt processes with proven benefit in this area.

In our own production area in Bath we aim to make efficient use of materials and resources, and to produce as little waste as possible. Where waste is unavoidable, we try to recycle so that our scrap is much reduced.