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- Andrae, Anders, 1973, et al.
(författare)
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Application of Simplified Methods for Partial Environmental Assessment of Microelectronics Soldering Materials and Processes in Small and Medium Sized Enterprises
- 2005
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Ingår i: International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. ; 10:5
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- As a consequence of the environmental regulations becoming stricter for companies within the microelectronics business area, alternative materials and processes with lower environmental performance will have to come in use. These new materials and processes should be process validated, and environmentally assessed. The Swedish microelectronics manufacturers do not use environmental assessment tools to determine if one alternative is "greener" than the other, as they have neither time nor legislative pressure. Instead, they refer to ´lists´ regarding limitations in the use of forbidden chemicals, and compare the ´lists´ with material safety data sheets. IVF in Sweden had the task of co-ordinating a governmentally financed project of which one of the goals was to advise producers, of microelectronics, on how to compare different material/process alternatives when introducing Pb-free soldering manufacturing technology. The scope of this paper is the evaluation of simplified and partial environmental assessment methods for microelectronics soldering. The problem addressed was the identified scarce understanding and under-use of environmental assessment methodologies in the small and medium sized enterprises in the Swedish electronics industry. A subtask was to analyse if it would be possible to perform a useful evaluation in one working day.A literature study revealed that several methods exist for environmental assessment, but most of them were assessed to be too complicated for the purpose of the present study. Two methods were introduced in the project; a qualitative Checklist Method (CM), and the quantitative Toxic Potential Indicator (TPI) that was used as a screening approach. The methods were tested at a microelectronics manufacturer to find out the applicability and the easiness of use. The checklist was applied to two wave soldering concepts and the TPI was applied to two Sn-Pb solder pastes and two Pb-free solder pastes. The CM generates information that can be used in the identification of qualitative environmental aspects, and the TPI provides fast but coarse results. It was possible for the company to perform this limited environmental assessment in one working day, as the amount of available input information is fairly limited. The participating microelectronics manufacturers in this study have confirmed this. The companies will use fast, understandable and rapidly introducible methods. The TPI was easy to use practically, but the input data available was regarded as too rough to distinguish among similar solder pastes. Anyway, by using the methods described in this paper, it would be possible to perform the assessment in one working day. It was perceived as worthwhile for the CM, and also to some degree for the TPI, despite data gaps for flux constituents. It is recommended that the flux constituents of solder pastes are risk evaluated to provide data for indicator tools like the TPI. The CM and the TPI should also be evaluated in industry sectors other than the microelectronics sector. This is needed to generally answer whether there are useful and systematic methods of environmental risk evaluation in product development. In a broader view, it should be researched what barriers are hindering small and medium sized enterprises to invest more in design for environment.
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| 2. |
- Andrae, Anders, 1973
(författare)
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Environmental Life-cycle Assessment in Microelectronics Packaging
- 2005
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An increased understanding of the application of environmental Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies in the microelectronics packaging area should help in developing environmentally sound product systems. The aim of the present thesis is to increase the knowledge of using LCA tools, methods and models, in application to current and new microelectronic products. A subgoal is to establish a better understanding of how to collect data to be used in a Life-Cycle Inventory (LCI) and environmentally assess the importance of the upstream processes. The objective has been to explore how variants of LCA could be used in microelectronics applications and the LCA software EcoLab and available data were utilised to analyse environmental loads. Different case studies were performed on (i) microelectronic products, (ii) substrate and soldering materials, and (iii) plating and soldering processes. The main emphasis has been on the upstream processes. Analysis of the results shows that the input data needed for environmental assessment of electronics applications comes from many different sources. An LCI data collection model applicable to most electronic products helps quantifying upstream processes. This is explained for a digital telephone. The global shift from Sn-Pb to Pb-free solder paste was modelled using attributional LCA and consequential LCA. It was found that the attributional and consequential methodologies yield complimentary knowledge about the environmental consequences of the shift. In this thesis, uncertainty estimation in LCI using Monte Carlo simulation was also investigated. The approach was applicable to small one parameter cradle-to-gate systems. There are strong indications that electrochemical pattern replication is more CO2 efficient than conventional photolithography, and that glass fiber enforced liquid crystalline polymers are more CO2 efficient than the corresponding brominated epoxy (FR4), polytetrafluoroethylene (Teflon®) and ceramic/glass tape. In addition to this, the effect of system expansion of manufacturing processes of the new packaging concept System-In-a-Package was addressed. This expansion of the upstream product system changes the relative environmental importance of manufacturing processes. Overall, environmental LCA are applicable to microelectronics packaging, but the assessments are hampered by the lack of ready available input LCI data.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Andrae, Anders, 1973, et al.
(författare)
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Significance of intermediate production processes in life cycle assessment of electronic products assessed using a generic compact model
- 2005
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Ingår i: Journal of Cleaner Production. ; 13:13-14, s. 1269-1279
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper a generic model for life cycle inventory (LCI) data collection is presented and applied to a product system of a digital system telephone (DST). It is also shown that intermediate unit processes (IUPs) are of global warming importance. Compared to earlier efforts in the field of environmental life-cycle assessment of electronic products, the developed model enables a more partitioned LCA result, with respect to both components and processes. In our model the components are first divided into main groups and then into sub-groups. This division results in process modules for unit processes, some of which are similar for the ingoing components, thus reducing the computational effort. The model is demonstrated for a cradle-to-gate calculation focusing on greenhouse gas emissions. Using scenario analysis for integrated circuits and printed wiring boards, the possible contribution from IUPs was analysed.
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