Every so often, we engineers find ourselves at the center of attention at cocktail parties as we pick our way through the half-truths and spin our friends have acquired as the mainstream media gives tech stocks, DSL services or wireless LANs their 15 minutes of fame. Unfortunately, this time we'll be in the hot seat about issues regarding the environmental impact of semiconductors that have recently surfaced in diverse publications from CNET to Salon.com.

Most of the hubbub will be caused by a study to be published in the Dec. 15 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society, that takes a close look at the natural resources required to produce microcircuits. According to the study, it takes 3.7 pounds of fossil fuels and other chemicals and 70.5 pounds of water to produce a single 2-gram microchip. While I might dispute some of the numbers in the study, it sheds light on one of our industry's dirty little secrets. It also gives us excellent insights into the next challenges in building a sustainable future.

I have not had a chance to read the entire study, but it looks like the numbers it provides are essentially correct-except that those numbers are based on conventional IC production methods and don't take into account some of the innovations being put into practice today.

Companies like Philips, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments have been aggressively reducing the amount of water and chemicals associated with chip making. Right now, those companies have found it's possible to recycle at least 75 percent of IC process water, discharge waste water that's cleaner than it was coming into the plant, and actually save money doing it. Meanwhile, some companies are finding they can eliminate many of the toxic chemicals usually used to remove photoresist from wafer surfaces by new processes involving super-ozonated water, or supercritical CO2 scrubs.

But even with the best green manufacturing technologies, and with practical energy conservation measures that can be used to cut the energy that goes into making a chip by 50 percent or more, the devices to which we devote our careers have an impact far larger than their tiny size would lead us to believe. Of course, we can't abandon the use of the handy little chips that have worked themselves into every aspect of our lives, but we can begin to make better decisions about how and where to use them.

By understanding their environmental impact, we can strive to reduce the number of chips in our designs and incorporate environmental issues into our design strategies. This might include designing products with easy upgradability, reuse or even component recovery and reuse in mind. In this way, we'll do a better job of making the difficult trade-offs to provide a better future for our children.

Comments? Questions? Ideas for designing a better world? Write me at lgoldberg@greenelectronics.com.

http://www.eet.com/