Usefulness and Precision of LCA in Microelectronics Packaging

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 work 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. Overall, environmental LCA are applicable to microelectronics packaging, but the assessments are hampered by the lack of ready available input LCI data.

Dr. Anders Andrae is a Senior Expert of Life Cycle Assessment at Huawei Technologies Sweden AB, Kista, Sweden. Between 2006 and 2008 he carried out post doctoral research at the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan. Recent special field is LCA of solders and conductive adhesives.