Life Cycle Assessment of etching processes for FDSOI transistors technologies

The semiconductor industry is aware of its high resource consumption and overall impact on the environment and is working to minimize it. Especially, the use of perfluorocarbons (PFC) during the dry etching and deposit steps of device manufacturing is a major concern because of the extremely high global warming potential (GWP) and lifetime of most of those compounds. Consequently, plasma etching significantly contributes to CO2 emissions for sub-28 nm technologies on Scope 1 & 2 emissions. Currently, CEA-Leti is developing a 10 nm node on FDSOI (Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator) technology. In this framework, we present Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of etching processes for FDSOI transistor technologies. A comparison of impacts between the 28 nm node and 10 nm one is then conducted for FEOL and MEOL processes. Finally, based on these results, some eco-innovation proposals are discussed.