Environment

Sustainability: Creating Eco-Efficiency through Technology
Powering Innovation through Clean Technology
MPS’s primary business objective has been to develop technology and semiconductor products that constantly push the boundaries of what is possible in every new generation of our product cycle. MPS recognizes the importance of climate change and has dedicated resources to reduce our direct impacts on air, water, and waste through our direct operations and our supply chain. Our business objective, products, and technology will enable customers and end users to achieve their own sustainability goals within each end market we serve in the global community, including but not limited to electric vehicles, energy infrastructure, factory automation and advanced safety applications. Our adopted Environmental Policy reflects our commitment to utilizing our resources for continued environmental stewardship.

Our products often have the highest power density in the industry, giving us a unique opportunity to help our customers meet their energy goals. For example, our products annually save approximately 4.3TWh of electricity, which is the equivalent of removing 3 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere or the equivalent of taking over 600,000 passenger cars off the road.

 
Our company culture is anchored in innovation. It is our primary tenet, informing everything we do. For this reason, our Research and Development (R&D) investments focus on making ever-more efficient products and meeting concrete power loss reduction goals.
MPS will Adopt Scope 1 & 2 GHG Global Emissions Reduction Strategies in 2022.

And the positive impacts of our innovation are tangible. Today, our solutions are integrated into a broad array of electronic devices and products worldwide – including energy-efficient and green technologies, many of which we all use every day, such as:
MPS’s design objectives and customers’ needs require us to constantly improve power efficiency in our products. Our commitment to efficient power solutions drives our business strategy and we work to create the most powerful solutions with the least power loss for our customers:
Data Center Solutions
We design energy-efficient data center power solutions that aim to increase computing power without increasing energy consumption. Currently, AI computer designs require significantly greater power than previous generations. Data centers are therefore interested in adopting power architecture designs that reduce energy losses while supporting greater power. To meet the industry’s increasing power requirements, we have developed a more innovative power architecture approach, using a higher voltage solution that is capable of significant reductions in power distribution losses. Our wide-ranging solutions are designed specifically to provide servers with more power in space-constrained environments. This facilitates a higher percentage of power delivered to the server, resulting in a significant reduction in energy wasted as heat, lowering data center energy and cooling requirements, which lowers both overall operational costs and carbon footprint. It is our goal to continue to improve our energy-computing ratio and deliver direct and measurable energy savings to our data center customers.
 
Notebook Solutions
We provide digital power solutions that keep families and businesses moving, with notebooks that have more battery life, better processing performance, and less power consumption. We have worked with our customers to provide digital power solutions with high switching frequencies that are more efficient and reduce board space by up to 70%. The space savings provides greater efficiencies in battery power, which reduces overall power consumption, and increases the overall performance. In addition, our solutions provide the benefit of efficiencies in battery charging cycles, extending the life of the battery and laptop, thereby helping to reduce e-waste.
 
Electric Vehicles
The transformation of consumer and commercial vehicle engines from internal combustion to electric represents a revolutionary opportunity for ecological advancement, and MPS’s expertise positions us well to continue to develop and provide solutions for this transformation. Our high-voltage converters maximize power conversion efficiency and are utilized throughout the car from USB chargers to LED lights. In the digital cockpit, our intelligent digital power products simplify system designs, resulting in a smaller component footprint that requires fewer raw materials and reduces power consumption, delivering every available Watt to the motor. This increases both the vehicle range and battery life. In addition, self-driving cars have optimized driving patterns that greatly reduce traffic congestion and avoid unnecessary hard acceleration and braking, resulting in lower fuel and/or battery consumption. In self-driving cars, our power and precision analog solutions make it possible for automakers to achieve safe and reliable Level 4 (high automation, driver required with minimal interaction) and Level 5 (full automation, no driver) capabilities in automated driving systems. MPS has made investments in our electric vehicle technology solutions and continues to develop products to meet these opportunities.
 
LED Controller and Driver Solutions
Our portfolio of LED and WLED drivers and controllers use proprietary technology to integrate passive components, such as inductors and capacitors, to shrink board space and reduce components, which improves energy efficiency and extends the life of a light. We also use thermal regulators that trigger protection features when the LEDs reach critical thresholds. These features allow the LEDs to continue functioning within a safe operating margin, extending their lifespan. Longer lifespans lower carbon emissions by decreasing the need for replacement bulbs and reducing waste from packaging and manufacturing processes. MPS’s solutions for LED technology improvements are aimed at improved performance in each generation of products, and continuing to improve upon these energy consumption and waste reductions.
 
Smart Home and Building Solutions
Our power-saving products are used in numerous smart-home and building applications, such as HVAC systems, electric and gas meters, home remote controls, IP network cameras, as well as gas, smoke, and heat detectors. Our integrated solutions run efficiently and are capable of powering wireless connected devices, allowing households and businesses access to accurate, real-time monitoring of energy or water consumption. Connected devices optimize energy usage, detect power outages, and reduce water waste and maintenance costs, lowering consumption compared to traditional solutions.
 
Solar Power
MPS provides solutions that extend solar power system longevity and efficiency. Our portfolio of products is designed to increase power output of solar arrays by reducing switching losses and optimizing efficiency, thereby converting more sunlight into usable energy. MPS is positioned to continue developing and providing cutting-edge solutions to allow solar power industry to meet increases in demand for this power source.
Ongoing Investment in Clean Technologies
Our commitment to developing efficient power and LED lighting solutions, used in many environmentally friendly and clean technologies, is in part evidenced by our historic and ongoing investments in technology improvements. Our annual investment toward R&D has more than doubled in the last 5 years. Our rolling 3-year R&D to Sales ratio was 16.5%; 300bps on average higher than our industry peers. At MPS, improving performance and energy efficiency is a principal goal in our R&D and design process. We aim to make every new generation of products more energy efficient than its predecessor and therefore have embedded increased efficiency in each of our new product workflows. This philosophy catalyzes significant advances in reducing carbon emissions for all the end markets we serve. We have just a few examples of these advancements shared here:

Our data center power solutions offer significant reductions in both board space and power losses. We recently developed a solution for data center servers utilizing vertical power delivery using 2-phase DrMOS Modules with integrated inductor as opposed to the traditional horizontal power delivery using 1-phase DrMOS with discrete Inductors, which in turn utilizes only half of the space of traditional horizontal power delivery solutions. Additionally, we have leveraged a Power Delivery Network path between the voltage regulator and the CPU to reduce power losses by up to 50% when compared to lateral power products at high current usage.

Our integrated solutions also help drastically increase energy savings and power density for electric vehicles. Our power modules solutions help further leverage the efficiency gains with a smaller solution size compared to traditional solutions while also improving EMI performance.

On top of our advancements in our product efficiencies, MPS is also committed to increasing its efficiencies during product testing. We have made vast strides in ensuring we optimize our increases in product testing capacity and goal to reduce energy consumed per unit tested. Since 2019, we have improved our electricity consumption per unit tested by 65%, despite nearly doubling our capacity during that time period.
Environmental Management
We want to minimize any potential adverse environmental impacts of our business operations and protect the environment. We proactively identify and review any environmental risks, minimize those risks, and continuously improve upon our performance. We have policies and procedures in place to ensure that potentially harmful chemicals or hazardous materials are safely handled, used, and disposed of, or are recycled. We maintain and update data on the prohibition or restriction of specific substances as required by various oversight organizations. For a comprehensive view of our policies and procedures over environmental stewardship, see our Code of Social Responsibility here.
Furthermore, we adhere to global standards for environmental management to help us minimize our operations’ impact on the environment. Our company is ISO14001 certified and has developed an environmental management system that is integrated into our everyday business management processes, with a focus on continuous improvement. Our EMS helps ensure we comply with applicable laws, regulations, and requirements, and in turn we require this certification from our key manufacturing suppliers. Our products are shipped in compliance with the European Restriction of Hazardous Substances (ROHS) directive and exclude banned substances such as BFRs, PVC, phthalates, beryllium, arsenic, and antimony.
Sustainable Operations and Energy Management
We are committed to both sustainable, energy efficient operations and increased use of clean energy technology at each of our locations. For example, our largest global facility in Chengdu, China sources 70% of its purchased electricity from hydropower. Additionally, at our largest U.S.-based facility, in San Jose, California:
Greenhouse Gas Emissions
In an effort to meet our goal of understanding our contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, we track and submit our greenhouse gas emissions for our largest facility, located in Chengdu, China, to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). Our CDP reports can be found here: MPS CDP Reports
 
 

The work of CDP is crucial to the success of global business in the 21st century... helping persuade companies throughout the world to measure, manage, disclose and ultimately reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. No other organization is gathering this type of corporate climate change data and providing it to the marketplace.

Ban Ki-moon, Former Secretary General, United Nations

Production volume at our Chengdu facility increased from 2017 to 2020. During this same period, Scope 1 GHG emissions generated at this location through onsite boilers, air conditioning units, and our fleet of vehicles declined.
Scope 1, 2 and 3 GHG Emissions
Our strategy is to continue to reduce our Scope 3 emissions, by leveraging our technology and passion for innovation, to create increasingly efficient products that allow us, and our customers, to decrease our collective emissions impacts. Annually, our products remove 3 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere. In addition, MPS is investigating its Scope 3 emissions baseline through expanded supply chain outreach to partner with our suppliers in developing Scope 3 emissions reduction goals.



Since we began tracking our Scope 1 emissions, we have reduced our total direct emissions, despite our rapid growth and increased employee headcount. Additionally, while our production volume nearly doubled over the past four years, during the same time-period we maintained a steady rate of Scope 2 emissions generated per product unit. We are now developing our supply chain outreach plan, to understand our Scope 3 emissions baseline and to partner with our suppliers to develop reduction goals.
Water Usage & Emissions Data Table
*Emissions data converted to GHG using Chinese government (Sichuan Province) suggested methodology.