Environmental Impact Assessment of Eco-Friendly Chemical Solutions Used in Microelectronics Industry

The semiconductor industry is known to be a major consumer of chemicals in wafer cleaning, etching, and surface preparation. It is crucial to minimize its environmental footprint by designing new chemical platforms, and additionally offering less toxic & ESH-compliant chemicals, and processes with low energy consumption while preserving equivalent performances. This paper presents the environmental footprint of sustainable chemical alternatives for post-plasma etch residue cleaning, by combining both approaches: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) based on international standards [1], and Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) method [2] recommended by EU commission. Finally, an example introducing new design formulations with lower impact than the reference formulation is presented.