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Chementator Briefs

| By Edited by Gerald Ondrey

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Semiconductors

This month began a three-year project to reduce greenhouse gas emissions released by thin film tools used in the semiconductor industry during the production of semiconductors by using alternative fluorine gas mixtures. Called ecoFluor, the project is combining the technology and know-how of Solvay S.A.s (Brussels, Belgium; www.solvay.com) Global Business Unit (GBU) Special Chem, Texas Instruments, Muegge and The Fraunhofer Institute for Microsystems and Solid State Technologies (EMFT). The project is partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF; Bonn).

The ecoFluor project focuses on new cleaning processes for chemical vapor deposition (CVD) chambers in the semiconductor industry and replaces the three major cleaning gases hexafluoroethane (C2F6), tetrafluoromethane (CF4) and nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) with gas mixtures based on F2/N2/Ar mixtures. These F2 gas mixtures will be produced in GBU Special Chems plants in Bad Wimpfen, Gemany and Onsan, Korea.

Such replacement can have a meaningful environmental impact considering that the most widely used cleaning gas, nitrogen trifluoride, has a global warming potential (GWP) of 17,200 times that of CO2, while the proposed alternative has a GWP equal to CO2.

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