Quantifying the environmental footprint of semiconductor equipment using the environmental value systems analysis (EnV-S)

Many environmental and health impacts from semiconductor processing are tied to the design of the manufacturing equipment. Evaluating solutions to properly treat effluents from semiconductor tools has become an increasingly important part of supply chain management and equipment procurement decisions. Accordingly, understanding the environmental footprint associated with equipment sets is essential for both equipment manufacturers and semiconductor manufacturers seeking to improve their products' environmental and financial performance. Equipment environmental performance must be evaluated within the context of the factory infrastructure and auxiliary equipment sets, with appropriate allocations of impacts from additional steps, both upstream and downstream of the wafer processing tools (chemical precursor delivery as well as byproduct treatment). Several challenges to environmental assessments arise from the nature of semiconductor manufacturing itself, due to short process life cycles, complexity of processes, and the need to track diverse inter-related impacts. Environmental value systems analysis (EnV-S) is an analytical tool to evaluate the environmental performance of semiconductor processing. EnV-S develops environmental assessments through a "bottom-up" analysis approach, assembling equipment environmental models to describe a system. This paper presents the use of EnV-S as a tool to quantify the environmental impact of a product or process by creating an operational signature along multiple dimensions of cost and environmental and health factors. The use of EnV-S is illustrated through a case study comparing systems that abate emissions from dielectric chemical vapor deposition processes.